Actually, Doug’s glove scenario above is indicative of this very thing and I’m impressed with the way he took the customer culture and applied it in a safety “lineside” setting. That’s what we should all be striving for.

Here is a novel metric: Let’s measure the % of time agents do what they are supposed to do, by call type. Customers call us for many reasons…to activate a phone, to replace a credit card, to order cable services or we call them to upsell them or collect money. There are certain things that are supposed to be said to customers and done in desktop systems on those calls…those things are, in part, what make it a good call for the customer and a good call for the company.

There are two struthious reasons why few centers have this metric at all let alone accompanied by a drill-down by call type. The first is that for most centers, it is a hard measure to gather. You have to dedicate speech analytics programming or you have to dedicate monitors to sampling calls and listening to see if the required call components are there and you have to do it regularly to see if progress is being made. Instead they make a dashboard of what is easy to measure. In so doing, they are like the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp, even though that is not where he lost them, because “the light is better here.”

The second reason is actually a bit more insidious. They don’t measure it because they have unplugged the smoke alarms. They know it is a problem but they don’t measure it because they don’t know how to fix it. They have tried monitoring and coaching but they can’t move the needle. What they may or may not realize is monitoring and coaching can not fix process variation, but they do know that they don’t know what else to do.

Until we measure whether we are doing what we are supposed to do on each call and taking steps to reduce the inevitable between agent variation in process and outputs we really are way beyond boring. We are failing our employees, who want to do the right thing, we are failing our customers who expect us to know what we are doing, and we are failing our shareholders by leaving revenue on the table (eg, failing to upsell), increasing costs (eg, callbacks), and putting the company at risk (eg, failing to give required disclosures). If interested, you can read more in this isixsigma.com article: http://www.isixsigma.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1567:fixing-between-agent-variation-can-make-all-the-difference&Itemid=223

Sincerely,

Dennis Adsit

To overcome that, I try to think of metrics in two groups, those you manage to and those that you monitor. The first is determined by strategy and operational objectives, the second contains everything else that indicates the health of your operation but is not necessarily associated with your objectives. Borrowing from the road trip example, if your engine maintains its temperature it has no influence on your trip, but if it overheats it will surely spoil your day.