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8 Innovative Contact Center Metrics You Need To Start Measuring

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Brian Cantor
Brian Cantor
04/30/2018

Make no mistake; contact center performance is ultimately defined by core “outcomes” like customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue.

Intermediary metrics, however, play an immensely important role in diagnosing performance, identifying challenges and uncovering opportunities.  They reveal “why” outcomes are where they are now – and what steps a business can take to achieve improvement down the road.

Traditional metrics like average handle time and first contact resolution are undoubtedly important in this quest.  They accurately reflect and measure much of the work an agent handles on a day-to-day process.

They, accordingly, help identify opportunities to improve agent performance – and drive better overall business outcomes.

They do not tell the full story.  They do not quantify the internal factors that affect agent performance.  They also pre-date – and thus fail to sufficiently measure – a lot of trendds central to today’s omnichannel customer centricity.

Forward-thinking organizations are thus look beyond traditional metrics when assessing performance.  They are looking for new scoring systems that better reflect the reality of engaging customers in today’s landscape.

To support that quest, CCW recently published a list of innovative, radical contact center metrics in its Special Report on Agent Performance.  We’ve highlighted (and updated) the list below:

Screens to profile: How many systems/screens must an agent access before gaining complete knowledge about who is calling, why they are calling, why they have called previously and what they likely want right now?  (Alternative: “Seconds to profile”)

Screens to knowledge: Once the customer has asked a question, how many knowledgebase screens must the agent manually navigate in order to acquire the right information?  This can be used as an assessment of the agent (should they already know the answer) as well as of the system (is it helpful enough).  (Alternative:  “Seconds to knowledge,” “Questions to knowledge”)

Value of Free Time (VFT): Divide the average time a customer spends on post-call work by the time a customer is available for new calls.

Personalization Meter: A measurement of the extent to which the agent is “personalizing” interactions.  This can be issued as a “grade” (following management’s qualitative review) or as a score (based on using analytics to compare overlap between interactions).

Agent Preference Rating: How many channels/touchpoints did a customer access before reaching the live agent?

Agent Redundancy Rating: What percentage of an agent’s calls could/should be handled in a self-service environment? (Alternative: What percentage of those calls started in a self-service environment?)

Self-service completion rate: Divide the number of customers who resolve their matter in self-service by the number that start addressing their issue in self-service.

Specialty Routing Score: What percentage of an agent’s interactions are in the agent’s area of specialty/expertise?

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