Off Center
 
Most contact center professionals will tell you how much they value their employees, and how the center has a lot of programs in place to keep agents – and thus customers – engaged and happy. However, few contact centers include Employee Satisfaction (E-Sat) on their formal list of key performance indicators.

And many of the centers that do consider E-Sat among their KPIs don’t do an adequate job of measuring/tracking the metric. Instead, they implement a plain-vanilla E-Sat survey once every year or two and take little action based on the findings.

The best contact centers give teeth and attention to E-Sat, using a comprehensive survey tool and implementing the survey once every six months or so. These surveys are designed to gauge not only traditional employee satisfaction, but also employee engagement. Engagement is satisfaction on steroids; engagement surveys help to identify which agents are not only happy with their job but also willing to maim others or themselves in the name of the company’s honor.
 
Most leading centers use an outside surveying specialist to design and implement the survey to ensure that the right questions are asked in the right ways, as well as to help foster a sense of privacy/anonymity, thus increasing the chances that agents will respond in a frank and honest matter. Surveying specialists can also help a contact center with evaluating results, pinpointing key trends and warning managers of a frontline mutiny.

Naturally, every contact center would love to achieve a 100% E-Sat rate, but that’s about as likely as a home agent bathing every day. As with C-Sat, anything in the 80%-90% range for E-Sat is impressive – and feasible, particularly if you incorporate into the survey process threats of physical harm for low ratings by staff. 

If E-Sat isn’t already on your contact center’s list of critical metrics, make some room for it. Bump AHT off the roster if you have to. And as for measuring E-Sat, don’t just go through the motions, or you’ll likely find that you have a bunch of agents doing the same. 
6 Comments
 
 
Some people are simply blessed with the power of prognostication. They have visions and pick up signals the average person cannot, thus enabling them to provide unique insight into how things are likely to go down in the future.

I am not one of those people, but that has never before stopped me from making bold predictions about contact centers and customer care.  

With the aid of my crystal ball and a couple cans of Red Bull, here’s what I see happening in 2012:


A new metric – “Average Speed of Anger” – will take hold.  Customers are more demanding than ever. It’s nearly impossible to respond to their calls, emails, chats, and social media comments/inquiries before they start whining or worse.  Many companies now find measuring traditional accessibility metrics like Average Speed of Answer (ASA) to be a waste of time. After all, even when the contact center hits an ambitious ASA objective, customers still complain and clamor for quicker service.

That's why a growing number of centers have started secretly tracking a new metric: Average Speed of Anger (ASA grrr),  which measures the average time it takes customers to become so enraged they curse your agents/IVR and/or blast your brand on Twitter. By focusing on ASA grrr, the contact center can make training and staffing adjustments that will quite possibly keep customers from killing anybody, and maybe even satisfy a few.


A law will be passed that makes it illegal for a contact center to not have a home agent program in place. Study after study has shown the huge impact home agent programs have on employee engagement, retention and performance, as well as staffing flexibility and operating costs. Nevertheless, three in four centers still don’t have a single home agent in place.

Fortunately, the leaders of these centers will soon be imprisoned and/or fined if they don’t get with the program. A militant but growing group – led by me – has been lobbying Congress about the issue for over a year now. I’ve been told by powerful sources that, thanks to my group’s efforts, Congress now views expanding home agent positions as a top priority, right behind balancing the Federal Budget and bringing down Kim Kardashian.  


A new type of cancer caused by over-exposure to acronyms will plague the customer care industry. This is one prediction I hope doesn’t come true; however, I don’t see how it can be averted. Medical researchers have strong evidence that excessive absorption of acronyms radically alters brain cells and can cause severe vowel deficiency.

A recent landmark study showed that lab mice placed in a cage lined with shredded ACD reports were 17 times more likely to develop malignant growths than were mice whose cage was lined with shredded long-winded speeches free of any abbreviations. The study led medical researchers to conclude that excessive exposure to acronyms may be more dangerous than smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while standing next to a Japanese nuclear power plant. The researchers implore contact center and customer service professionals to start using fully spelled-out terms as much as they can, and to do so ASAP.
 

4 Comments
 
 
As customer care and contact centers continue to evolve, so must the metrics that centers measure. Sure, some classic metrics – such as service level, quality and C-Sat – will be around forever; however less pertinent and impactful ones will fade away while newer, sexier measures emerge.

For example, in the early years of customer service, metrics like ATTCT (Average Time Till Carpal Tunnel) and NRPC (Number of Reps Per Cubicle) ruled the roost, but have since become secondary or tertiary metrics in most modern contact centers. As have such measures as HSPH (Headset Shocks Per Hour) and AAL (Average Agent Lifespan).

So, what fresh new metrics can we expect to emerge and soon bloom into powerful key performance indicators? I recently asked several noted contact center practitioners, consultants and analysts their opinion on the matter, but I forgot to record our conversations or take any notes, so here are my new KPI predictions instead:


FTR – First-Tweet Resolution. This will become an increasingly critical metric in this crazy age of social media. FTR measures the percentage of angry customers on Twitter that the contact center is able to “silence” before the customer posts any more tweets about how much they hate your company.

For example, let’s say that 10 of your customers write an incendiary comment about how the last agent they spoke to on the phone was an idiot or how your IVR system made them want to commit a violent crime. If your center is able to contact and persuade seven of those customers to not launch any additional 140-character verbal barrages, then your FTR rate would be 70%. But you will never achieve an FTR rate of 70% because 90% of human beings need Twitter to get the attention they desire but don’t get at home or work. So just shoot for a FTR rate of 10%-20%. 

Naturally, you don’t want the whole world seeing your desperate attempts to convince customers to stop flaming about your company on Twitter. Instead, it’s best to send each fuming customer a friendly private message via Twitter asking them to kindly call or email you to discuss how you might get them to shut up.    


ART – Average Refrigerator Time. This metric’s emergence is a direct result of the recent proliferation of home agents in the contact center industry. ART measures how many minutes per shift a home agent spends searching for snacks in the kitchen when they are scheduled to be on the phones. In contact centers that have a large percentage of former high school football linemen and/or aspiring Sumo wrestlers among their remote staff, ART is measured in hours rather than minutes.

To effectively measure ART, it’s essential to install in each home agent’s house a “fridge-cam” that captures and records every trip the agent makes to the kitchen while on the job. Unfortunately, it’s highly illegal to do so; nevertheless, the best contact center managers know that sometimes you have to break the rules in order to maintain the tradition and integrity of accurate and precise metric measurement.  

Most contact centers struggle to keep ART within acceptable ranges – not just because of the irresistible lure that the refrigerator presents for home agents, but also because most managers and supervisors in charge of home agents are uncomfortable telling an employee that he should watch his carb and fat intake. Some of the most forward-thinking centers have succeeded in lowering their ART rate by installing in each home agent’s fridge a sound card that says something like “You disgust me” or simply “AGAIN?” each time the refrigerator door is opened.


HSPH – Hand Spasms Per Hour. As web chat has grown as a customer contact channel, so have the debilitating finger cramps of the agents who handle chat sessions. A recent study that I conducted or maybe just had a dream about showed that contact centers that offer chat are 94.3% more likely to have agents who have hands that look like crab claws.

Thus, HSPH is fast becoming a critical metric in chat-handling centers that don’t like their employees looking like crustaceans. To measure HSPH, centers simply need to attach to the hands of each chat agent a small non-invasive electrode that detects each muscle spasm that occurs. HSPH scores in the 10-15 per hour range are considered normal; anything over that is a sign that the agent is at risk for moderate to severe hand cramping that could hinder their ability to compose coherent messages during chat sessions with customers. Once an agent’s HSPH score approaches 50 or more per hour, there is nothing left to do but pronounce their hand(s) legally dead, then move them into Sales, where all they’ll ever need to use is their mouth.

4 Comments
 
 
Conversations about contact center metrics often cause controversy – especially if you are having that conversation with me, and especially if I’ve been drinking at a conference cocktail reception. Drinking brings out the bold truth in me, and the bold truth (ok, my bold opinion) about metrics tends to stir things up amongst contact center folk. It’s one of the main reasons why I’m rarely invited back to industry events.

But I’m not looking to make friends – according to my Facebook and MySpace pages, I already have four. If what I write here results in me receiving hate mail or having things thrown at me by detractors, so be it – as long as the customer care industry as a whole improves.

In the interest of time and space, I’m not going to expound on what I feel are the most critical contact center metrics (service level, C-sat, FCR, forecast accuracy, adherence to schedule, contact quality, E-sat, and agent attrition). Nope, you’ll have to buy my upcoming ebook, Full Contact, for that (due out in just a few weeks!). Instead, today I’m going to discuss three popular metrics – those that have been coveted in our industry since its inception  – that I feel need to be clarified and brought back down to earth once and for all. These metrics certainly have their place – just not at the top of the heap.

1) Average Speed of Answer

No doubt that tracking how many seconds on average each caller is forced to wait before reaching a live agent is important. Then why isn’t ASA listed among my metrics A-list? Simple: It gets trumped by service level – a mightier metric that gives managers key information that already includes an ASA component.

ASA is like the unstable cousin or brother of service level – closely related to SL but much more likely to cause problems, mess things up, or get drunk and start a fight at a family wedding. What ASA lacks is the “X% in Y seconds” attribute of its blood relative, thus it does not always give the most accurate representation of what callers experience when trying to reach an agent in the contact center. ASA is a straight average, and many managers when seeing an ASA figure – say, 30 seconds – make the mistake of assuming that this figure is indicative of how long most customers waited before getting to an agent. However, the reality is that many callers get connected much more quickly than 30 seconds while many other customers may get connected after much more than 30 seconds.

So if you are looking to more accurately gauge what is happening to individual callers and not just hang your hat on a sometimes unreliable average – one that could conceal a host of irate callers who have access to social media and know how to use it – then it’s best to keep service level as your main accessibility KPI.

However, there is no need to disown ASA. It is still a useful metric in its own right – it can help in calculating trunk load and serves as a solid back-up measure to service level (since it comes from the same set of data as SL). Just remember that it can be dangerous to fully embrace this somewhat unstable metric or to invite it to important family functions.

2) Abandonment

When I say abandonment, I’m talking about the accessibility metric, not the feeling that contact center managers experience after asking senior management for a budget increase.

A contact center’s abandonment rate is the percentage of callers who hang up before their call is answered by a live agent. This data can be obtained directly from ACD reports. The most common formula used for calculating abandonment is:

Total # of calls abandoned ÷ (total # of calls abandoned + total # of calls answered)

While abandonment is an important metric and one that should be tracked on an interval basis by all contact centers, it is not an ideal measure of accessibility. True, high abandonment rates usually indicate a problem with the center’s staffing levels – but not always; sometimes conditions beyond the contact center’s control result in higher than usual abandonment rates, and sometimes a large group of callers are just cranky and impatient because their football team lost the day before.

Another problem with relying primarily on abandonment as an accessibility measure is that a low abandonment rate – while certainly the goal in any contact center – does not automatically signify smooth operating. Again, different conditions often affect how long a caller will wait in queue before hanging up. For example, on a typical day, a contact center may achieve a respectable abandonment rate of, say, 1.5% and everything is fine with regard to service level and customer satisfaction. However, the next day let’s say that the company runs a “limited time” online promotion (“Call now and receive a…”); the center will likely receive a flood of calls and few customers will hang up because they have an incentive to wait – for long periods of time. So abandonment may be less than even 1%, but does this mean that service level is good, costs are contained, and that customers aren’t getting perturbed? Nope. Nope. And nope. 
   
3) Average Handle Time

Back in the pre-historic era of call centers, when cost reduction/efficiency was the only real objective, AHT ruled the land of metrics. But customer contact has evolved rapidly over the past couple of decades; and in the best-run organizations, so have the performance metrics. Top contact centers today, while still keeping an eye on AHT, focus more on quality, call resolution and customer satisfaction. It’s the Age of the Customer Experience. And though it’s still important to control costs and be efficient – just as it is in any business or industry – winning organizations realize that they stand to make a lot more money if they focus on their customers first to create lasting loyalty and advocacy. 

Contact centers should certainly not do away with such traditional productivity metrics as AHT and number of calls handled per hour/shift. After all, the center needs to have an idea about how many calls a typical agent is handling and how long those calls are lasting to help pinpoint any scheduling adjustments and/or special training/coaching that might be required. But the best contact center managers don’t set strict “hit this target or else” AHT objectives. For one, they recognize that many factors influencing handle times are out agents’ direct control – e.g., call complexity, caller mood, electric shocks from cheap headsets, etc. And secondly, these managers know that if they do set and rate performance based on a strict AHT target, agents will do what it takes to hit that target, which may include rushing calls, sloppily inputting data, and yelling “fire” before hanging up on customers and running out the building.   

Instead, managers in leading contact centers set acceptable ranges for AHT and only really focus on the numbers when the center’s or an agent’s AHT falls far outside the normal range, which typically indicates a problem with staffing levels, agent adherence or agent skills/knowledge.

Progressive managers view AHT reduction ultimately as their responsibility, not that of their agents. They realize that it’s up to them to make sure that the center’s forecasting and scheduling processes are sound and that agents receive the coaching and training needed to handle calls efficiently and effectively. What smart managers do hold agents accountable for is adherence to schedule. Agents can, for the most part, control when they are in their seats ready to take calls. And when they are where they should be, things like AHT and other productivity metrics tend to take care of themselves. No whip-cracking nor threats of physical harm to agents or their family is typically necessary.
9 Comments