I have been reading about call center KPIs, metrics and measures for several weeks now and I still walk away shaking my head.  Most service organizations are working on the wrong measure and worse working on the wrong problem.  Some of the metrics may be useful to know how to resource, but none hit the real problem in making things better.  For the command and control thinker these metrics are a dream as they can analyze themselves into oblivion . . . and usually do.

We have all types of metrics. Like:

  • Cost/Contact
  • Cost/Minute of Handle Time
  • Call Quality
  • Agent Occupancy
  • Training Hours
  • Absenteeism
  • Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
  • Call Abandonment Rate
  • IVR Completion Rate
  • Average Hold Time
  • % answered within 30 seconds
  • Average Handle Time
  • Talk Time
  • After Call Work Time

Most of this measurement tracking is a waste of time and resources.  The customer could care less about these metrics and the only one that matters to them is did you solve their issue.  I am always amazed that call centers spend so much time tracking data (and mostly unimportant data at that) and so little time improving the system they work in.  The response is usually, “but we can only be responsible for our call center, not sales or operations that is not our job” or “we can only do our part and hope that everyone else is doing theirs.”  This is the stuff of poor customer service everyone “doing their job” while the customer suffers the end-to-end system.  Command and control thinkers love to collect data, inspect phone calls, and figure costs . . . but no one looks at what the customer demands.  The result is a sub-optimized system that provides no business improvement, higher costs, and a sweat shop culture.  WOW! sign me up . . . I want to work in that environment (sarcasm).

There is a better way.  The systems thinking organization understand that the only metric that matters are those important to the customer (defined from purpose).  Sure the first call resolution (FCR) is useful when applied with knowledge, but the metrics that really matter to the customer are end-to-end from the customer perspective and may cross several functions in their current state.  Very few service organizations understand this.  They pay attention to each function building structures of front office, middle office and back office and then constantly redesigning them into shared services or outsourcing.  All of this activity is done with the aim of saving money and all of these activities typically increase costs . . . a management paradox I have discussed in other blogs.  All the sub-optimization increases costs and waste.

Most call centers still are not tracking one metric that does matter to customers . . . failure demand.  The unwanted demand into the call center that represents 25% – 75% of all calls into any one call center.  Failure demand are calls that are problems, follow-ups and other annoying calls that customers have to make to get served.  Failure demand drives up costs and drives out customers.  I am grateful to John Seddon (my Vanguard partner) for pointing this out to me.  Eliminating failure demand increases capacity, reduces costs and makes customers happy.

By understand the relationship between Purpose, Measures and Method.  A systems thinking organization soon learns that the purpose is to serve the customer, we can then derive metrics important to the customer and allow changes to method to accomplish the measures.  No targets here, just continually improvement of service.  Let your competition get buried in the cost of command and control thinking with their benchmarking, KPIs, and metrics/measures that don’t matter.  A systems thinking organization understands this is just waste and sub-optimization and allows them to work on customer problems with a simple change in thinking.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.