Well, now I am! I loved this two-part series Jay did so much that I asked him to do a presentation on this topic at ICMI’s Dallas Call Center Demo and Conference last week. I think the live session was even better than the articles, because of the audience participation and the dialogue that took place, and just because Jay’s a fun and professional speaker.

These articles make an excellent companion to Jodie Monger’s article that I just wrote about, Are You Guilty of Survey Malpractice? She delves into the details of survey practices and Jay uncovers a whole lot of other factors that you’ve likely never considered.

Surveys alone do not reflect true customer satisfaction levels. Behavioral metrics hold the key to managing dissatisfaction.

I love the way Jay pussy-foots around touchy issues so delicately, as he does here:

There are three main reasons why the information you get from these surveys is only vaguely reflective of true satisfaction levels:

1. The view of what constitutes a cus­tomer is much too narrow;

2. Evaluations are heavily slanted toward input rather than behavior; and

3. Some of you are manipulating the hell out of the data.

He should have been a diplomat instead of a call center consultant

Both articles are essential reading if you really want to understand the gap between all the glowing internal customer satisfaction reports and the constant complaints reported about widespread customer dissatisfaction. You can stick your head in the sand or you can learn the truth.

Measurement programs must meet certain scientific criteria to be statistically valid with an acceptable confidence level and level of precision or tolerated error. Without these considerations, you are guilty of Survey Malpractice. To defend your program with “it has always been this way” or “we were told to do a survey” is not sufficient. Research laws adhered to in academia apply to the business world. A deficient survey yields inaccurate data and results in invalid conclusions no matter who conducts it.

How hard is it to come up with a bunch of questions and create a survey? That’s what most of us think, and if you just want some quick and informal feedback, that’s fine. But your customer satisfaction measurements are another story altogether. Jodie explains seven warning signs of “survey malpractice”:

1. Measuring too many things
2. Not measuring enough things
3. Measuring questions with an unreliable scale
4. Measuring the wrong things or the right things the wrong way
5. Asking for an evaluation after memory has degraded
6. Accuracy and credibility of service providers and product vendors
7. Wiggle room via correction factors

(See the article for the explanation associated with each.)

Few performance metrics are as critical to contact center success as first-contact resolution (FCR); unfortunately, few performance metrics are also as misunderstood.

As I’ve already written (First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply), FCR is simple to grasp but far from simple to put into place in a meaningful way. As Greg put it:

According to the recently published ICMI Member Report on First-Contact Resolution, 79.2 percent of contact centers consider FCR to be either “critical/indispensable” or “very important.” The trouble is, many centers have implemented FCR initiatives too hastily, without taking time to fully understand the intricacies of the metric — i.e., what it actually means and how best to measure it, as well as what processes and tools the center should have in place to achieve a high FCR rate.

Check it out!

first call resolution call center metricscall center management

To bring quality candidates to your door, you have to have them at “hello.” Positive branding — attaching your call center’s name to a reputation for quality benefits for both customers and agents — can increase your desirability in applicants’ eyes.

read more | digg story

In this excerpt from their best-selling book, How to Build a Speech Recognition Application, EIG’s Bruce Balentine and David Morgan touch on the unique application design issues surrounding speech-enabled IVR systems.

read more | digg story

So it should not be surprising that the March 2008 issue of ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI), includes two articles that address call center metrics. Cliff Hurst, of Career Impact, Inc., offers his thoughts in “Identifying the KPI’s that Matter Most” and Fred Van Bennekom, of Great Brook Consulting, provides his own explanations in “Measuring Service Effectiveness.” I know both of them, as well, since they have been speakers at ICMI’s conferences and I respect the experience and judgment that each brings to the table.

It’s interesting, though, that Fred is in his “sweet spot,” since his area of expertise truly is in measurement, particularly statistical measurement, while Cliff is probably best known for his work on quality monitoring. I think this difference shows in the two articles and the approaches each writer takes.

You’ll see in Fred’s a precise organization, where every metric or method gets defined and then has its advantages and then its shortcomings explained in order. He knows in depth what he’s talking about and so can get to the point concisely. I like the graphic he included, too, which again shows the orderly way he has addressed his subject:

The Portfolio of Customer Feedback Research Techniques

What I like about Cliff’s approach, however, is that this material does not come across as routine when he writes about it. He’s got almost an explorer’s mindset as he tackles the challenge of identifying what KPI’s call centers should use — which is the same attitude that call center managers themselves need to have.

He starts off with an analogy about dashboards related to his daughter learning to drive (which any of us with teenagers can relate to), and before he addresses any specific KPI’s at all, he lists five commandments:

1. Don’t be a copycat.
2. Don’t mistake common practices for best practices.
   
3. Find the right balance among KPIs.
4. A well-worn management aphorism goes something like this: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” (he goes on to debunk this one)
5. Remember what Peter Drucker said, “The data itself is not as important as are the trends in the data.”

Read the article to see the explanations that go along with each of those points, but just from the list alone you can see that this article is not just a list of all the KPIs one could use in a call center. In fact, I thought some of the best advice in the article was right there in that list.

Put both of these articles and these experienced professionals’ guidance together, and you’ve got some great insight into call center metrics. I recommend reading both of these articles if call center metrics have any importance to you.

ADDENDUM 3/14/2008:

I ran across another commentary on call center metrics after I originally posted this entry. ICMI’s Kelly Brickley posted “Obtaining Agent Buy-in for Metrics” in the CMI blog, From the Field with ICMI Certified Associates. As Kelly writes, it’s a common challenge for call center managers to get agents to understand why they are being measured the way that they are.

Her advice begins, sensibly, with looking at the KPIs themselves.

At ICMI, we recommend the following individual KPIs: Adherence to schedule and quality. As an agent, I can control whether I’m doing the right things at the right times, or whether I’m logged in when I’m supposed to be. In addition, I have the ability to ensure that the call which I‘m handling right now is conducted with the highest quality.

Kelly’s advice is a good reminder to look hard at the meaning of the casually-tossed-around term, KPI: KEY Performance Indicators. KPI’s are not all the useful measures, nor are they every meaningful or potentially significant measure. They are the “key,” as in “most critical” measures that indicate how well you are performing.

Despite our industry’s fondness for statistical measures of so many dizzying kinds, the idea behind KPI’s is simplicity. Narrow them down, choose them very carefully, monitor them closely, learn what changes in them really mean, and take action where indicated.
call center metricscall center management

Is it just me, or is there no truly appealing option among all those FCR implementation choices — what’s a call center manager supposed to do? For such a promising concept — and Donna expertly explains so many of the reasons call centers want to measure FCR and make it a call center KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — we don’t seem to be much farther along than I was so many years ago when I first struggled to implement it by pulling CSR call resolution codes into an Access database and running queries to calculate in an imperfect way what was a contractual metric for our call center’s client.

What is the answer here? I’d welcome comments and ideas from call center professionals using FCR. How are you measuring it, and how effective do you find those results to be in helping you to improve the customer experience?

ADDENDUM 3/19/08

On this topic, I have just added another post, First Contact Resolution Research Report. There you’ll find more resources for learning about FCR.

ADDENDUM 5/17/08

Just added another post on this topic: CMI: First Contact Resolution Unraveled.
first call resolution call center metricscall center management

It’s a good review of the key principles for getting call center metrics right, so I recommend that you read it. Here’s Tim’s conclusion:

The best contact centers know that metrics are simply an indicator of opportunities, and that real positive change happens when leaders focus on the right behaviors that help the voice of your company get better.

call center metrics call center management

Developed and executed by OmniTouch International, an ICMI Global Partner headquartered in Singapore, the Global Service Index Report will focus on a different industry sector each quarter. Upcoming sectors include the mobile industry, consumer electronics and hospitality. The results can be used to identify country, regional and global trends on an ongoing basis, and to document individual company performance standards within each selected country.

There’s a wealth of contact center management data and analysis in the report, so it’s certainly worth taking a look for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from the findings:

So how well did the banking contact centers in the GSI study carry out the agent performance standards? Of the 40 banks included in the study, the top-performer was in India. That country also ranked the highest for overall performance, followed by Australia and the United States (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Overall Agent Performance by Country

call center management

Learn what another contact center is doing in the Contact Center Spotlight on Pacific Gas & Electric, featured in ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI).

Pacific Gas & Electric may be dedicated to turning the lights on in northern and central California, but in the competitive customer contact area, PG&E is shooting the lights out.

call center management