The concept of a “North Star” metric has become a fashionable discussion among start-up culture. The idea is that companies should find a single, simple metric to focus on and, if they choose well, it will align everyone on the team with the actions needed for success. Check out this deck on that topic from Sean Ellis, who popularized the “growth hacking” phenomenon.
Call centers are highly focused on metrics too. If most call center teams had to pick a “North Star” it would be service level, which measures the length of time callers wait to reach an agent. It’s kind of surprising that, despite all the enormous changes that have occurred in customer service technology, the dominant metric remains service level. Even more surprising is that most call centers would name the same target value for that metric: the magical “80/20”. Why is this so? Continue reading
This week we present a new installment in our “Pitfalls” series which looks at common mistakes made when measuring or interpreting contact center metrics.
It goes without saying that making your customers wait so long that they simply hang up (aka abandon the call) is a bad idea. It also goes without saying that this is rarely intentional (with the possible exception of my current cable provider).
n a modern multi-channel contact center agents should have the ability to handle several customer interactions simultaneously. Indeed, some interactions do not fully occupy the agent’s capacity and leave some room for other activities. Let’s consider a situation where an agent is handling an email message from a customer. Suppose also that a call arrives from another customer and there are no available agents to route this call to. It is clear that it would be reasonable to distribute the call to the agent who is working with email, otherwise the call could be abandoned and the customer could be lost.
Contact center call-backs are an under-used and under-appreciated technology. The basic concept has been around for decades, but only in the last few years have we learned how beneficial it can be – for both the call center and the caller.
