Contact Center Performance Management: why it matters for us, me and U!

Posted by: fredzimny on: 2009/07/05

In: CRM, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0 and Information Technology,| Front Office and Customer Service Operations, Knowledge management, Performance management| Misc. & Music| Recovery and the way out of the crisis, recession and depression| Vision, visionaries, vision things, trends
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Regular readers of this blog may be aware of the fact that I work within the health insurance industry. And if you are familiar with the Dutch contact center industry, I’m also active in our branch organization expert group performance management. So after 900 posted items, it becomes time to deliver my personal thought about performance management! Hope you enjoy it!

An industry heavily regulated in the Netherlands with fierce competition and low margins. And now also victimized by the financial and economic depression (and believe me it’s going to be real tough in the Netherlands in the forth coming years). And in my management and leadership role I and our leadership team embrace performance management,

Performance management was one of the most important enterprise-wide management “concepts” to find its way into the post-merger implementation phase of our contact center.

At the start-up our management team was aware that many successful contact centers adopted a performance management culture, where they use metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure all significant activities and events that happen in their shops. In our leadership role we embraced COPC and started implementing table F as being the core of our performance management system.

In the Netherlands I notice that some contact centers transform from cost centers to profit centers. In my opinion, then the role and importance of contact center performance management (CCPM) will grow even more.

The major forthcoming depression in the Netherlands will speed up focusing on performance management, as our company – just like any company in the Netherlands – faces pressure to substantially reduce operational expenses.

What is performance management in my opinion?

For me it is a strategic, practical and tactical tool.

At the strategic level it provides our leadership team with a framework and tools that helps us to align our goals (but also the goals of the regions, the teams, their supervisors, our agents and and the support staff) with those of our company.

Performance management also is highly tactical, practical and actionable. Our application provides scorecards and dashboards that are used to measure the performance of departments, functions, teams and agents. And depending on the metric we manage on an ongoing daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Yes and indeed it delivers highly effective reports and analytics that make it easy to see where change is necessary to improve the performance and effectiveness of a business function or agent.

Performance management is an operational requirement

As every contact center we use metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure our performance.

As mentioned before we are in a phase of post merger implementation, merging small and informal centers with “large and formal” organizations.In small and informal contact centers, the primary KPIs may be the number of calls handled, the average speed of answer (ASA) or the number of transfers; the larger organizations were already in a phase of measuring and managing more metrics.

Nowadays, in our large, formal enterprise contact center, we use dozens of metrics used to measure the performance of the department, for example, first time right (FTR), service level, customer satisfaction (post transaction survey) and average handle time.

Writing honestly: any contact center, formal or informal, that uses metrics or KPIs to measure its effectiveness is already using performance management.

What is the Future for CCPM within our department?

Debates continue about the future of contact center performance management.

Some say that CCPM functionality should be integrated into either workforce management (WFM) applications or quality management (QM) solutions. Others say that CCPM solutions should be incorporated into contact center infrastructure (the core routing and queuing solutions). And we also have the controllers who claim that they can deliver all relevant data.

I believe that CCPM scorecards and dashboards can help make WFM and QM solutions more actionable and we encourage their inclusion in these applications.

A major consultancy firm – DMG – also encourages the use of CCPM to

Photographer Abless http://www.flickr.com/photos/imable/

enhance the reporting capabilities of many ACDs. CCPM-oriented packages can also be used to address FCR, call reason identification, up-selling, agent coaching, performance appraisals, reviews, and a growing number of other functions, all of which depend on KPIs for effective execution. DMG appreciates that it’s been difficult to sell stand-alone CCPM applications, and the current economic climate is making it even harder. However, we must point out that it is the complexity of contact centers that makes CCPM so very important. Most contact center managers are buried in reports and numbers from a myriad of systems, and struggle to find the right levers to drive or enhance contact center performance. Complicating matters further, reports from various systems (we have 4 different ACD’s) often give different numbers for the same KPIs. Performance management is needed both to simplify the operational reporting environment and to give managers “one version of the truth.”

The Bottom Line

As also stated by DMG the CCPM function is never going to go away, as it is the most effective and objective way to measure all types of activities, from agent performance to training effectiveness to revenue and customer satisfaction. Performance management is increasingly used in our enterprises to share essential metrics with oure senior executive team on a weekly basis.

Now it’s time for contact center managers to make the necessary investments to ensure that senior management is aware of their contributions. CCPM is one of the the ways to achieve our CCC leadership goals.