Management of anything requires visibility. Metrics (or KPIs) are the key method how to measure performance and report on trends.
Salted CX has a rich set of industry-standard metrics that work across different platforms and provide visibility into many aspects of different types of contact centers.
Actionable Metrics
Foster a culture of making the metrics actionable. We recommend having a smaller set of metrics with clearly defined processes when they change. For each metric you plan to introduce you should ask these two questions:
- If the metric is higher than X who will do what?
- If the metric is lower than Y who will do what?
You should have an answer to at least one of these questions before you invest effort into introducing any metric. The “who” part helps you to understand who is the audience for the metric and can act on it. The “what” part helps you to understand whether the metric is actually actionable. You can enhance the “what” with “why” to justify the metric existence
There are a few examples:
- If the customer satisfaction is lower than 85% the customer experience team will walk through conversations in the last ten days and provide a list of corrective actions for individual teams. Because our company relies on loyal customers who buy more services over time and higher customer satisfaction increases the chance of future purchases.
- If the response rate to customer surveys in a channel is lower than 10% the customer experience team will create a new survey workflow for that channel and/or modify the questions asked to increase the response rate. Because we want to ensure that we receive as much customer feedback as possible.
- If the percentage of escalations from self-service to a life agent in a web menu is higher than 5% in a given branch the analytics team will check all conversations that were escalated to identify improvements in the menu. Because escalated requests are 50 times more expensive to handle we need to keep the number of agents at the current levels.
- If the number of negative auto reviews per agent exceeds 10 in a single day the agent’s team lead will prepare a coaching session for the agent based on the conversations that received the negative auto reviews. Because auto reviews cover all conversations and are an early warning that agents may not follow our customer satisfaction and quality assurance requirements.
- If the agent has schedule adherence lower than 95% the team lead will issue a warning to the agent or begin a disciplinary process if this repeats for the 3rd time. Because we have found that if we do not enforce this level of adherence we have issues with handling the inbound traffic during peak hours.
Features of a Good Metric
We recommend each metric to have at least these attributes defined:
- Owner. Somebody who understands the metric definition and what it should represent. Ideally this person would be able to answer questions how the metric should be calculated for different edge cases. This person should also be able to define the rest of the points in this list.
- Business reason. Why the metric is important for the company.
- Action is taken when lower and/or higher than a threshold. For each metric you should have a clear action that somebody takes when it crosses a defined threshold. This action should be in your operating procedures. Good place where to describe the next steps is the dashboard itself.
- Audience. Who is consuming the metric. These should be the same people who should take action if the metric crosses a threshold. It is also good to have a wide audience for transparency.
- Descriptive name. Use a name that is aligned with the company vocabulary and ideally aligned with the naming convention of Salted CX
- Detailed description. Imagine that you are explaining what the metric means and how it is used to a new person in your company. Include in the description why the metric is important, how to use it, how exactly is calculated, and if there are any particular cases in which it works well and in which it does not.