The answer I gave him was pretty straight forward – neither.

A center simply can not provide enough service if the focus is 100% on quality unless it is very over staffed, but at the same time, focusing solely on quantity, results in a significant decrease in customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Because of this, there needs to be a good balance struck.

What is KPI?

“Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to quantify objectives to reflect strategic performance of an organization. KPIs are used in Business Intelligence to assess the present state of the business and to prescribe a course of action.” (Wikipedia)

Wow! That’s a mouthful. What does it really mean? What is the use of them? The fact of the matter is that KPI measurements are crucial, but only if you’re gathering the right data and, more importantly, can act on the data. Without KPI being a catalyst for change, they are nothing but numbers. Currently, contact centers use a wide variety of information as their KPIs.  Contact Centers are, as Bruce Belfiore from Benchmark Portal stated in a class I attended, “one of the top industries to be able to benchmark against. Everything is logged, tracked and stored as data.”

CCs gain huge amounts of data from every angle — how long was the agent on the phone, how many times (and how long) was a customer placed on hold, how long did the customer wait before the call was picked up, how long did they wait before giving up, how many calls come in per timeframe, how many agents are staffed at any particular juncture, what’s the oldest call waiting, what was the oldest call waiting, etc etc etc. You could gather mounds of data upon mounds of data. But can do DO anything with it? That’s the question.

Most centers focus on a handful of choices, depending on their need. As an example, an inbound center often looks at : number of calls taken per agent, average length of on call and after call work, abandon rate, abandon time, service level measurements, average speed of answer, number of times and length of time that a person was placed on hold, and maybe number of dials out. Can you imagine a manager looking at a center with 100+ agents and trying to figure out how to improve? It is no wonder that many centers just coast along where they are and simply try to flounder and keep from drowning. The truth of the matter is that KPIs are extremely important.

Without focusing on KPI (and this, really, goes for any industry), one has nothing to measure themselves against and are simply arbitrarily choosing this or that to fix a problem. A sales group has quotas or dollar figures, manufacturing has defects, professional athletes have stats, call centers have theirs. It is, however, again a question of picking the RIGHT KPI to look at. A professional NFL linebacker, for example, isn’t going to try to have a higher YAC (yards after catch) than the wide receiver. Instead, they focus on number of tackles and number of sacks per game. In a call center, I believe there are six KPI that are what you need to focus on. These six will give you a strong indicator of the overall health of your center.

• Average Speed of Answer
• Abandon Rate
• Service Level
• Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Professionalism
• How well was the issue resolved

Together, they paint an extremely detailed picture of whether the customer’s questions are being answered correctly, whether they are being handled in a timely fashion, and whether the center is staffed appropriately. If you have to pick one, pick “Customer Satisfaction”. All of the others, if boiled down to the core, drive this one single KPI. In addition to this, if your Customer Satisfaction is high, then you drive loyalty, return business and have made a positive impact on your organization’s success.