BPA Featured Article

If you’re reading this article, chances are good that you are aware that the online world has provided consumers with far more power than they had in the past. Connected devices and information available online make it very easy for people to do comparison shopping, to choose and change suppliers at the drop of a hat, and to given their business only to the organizations that provide them with the best possible experience.

That’s why so many organizations are talking about customer experience these days. But, while upping your customer experience game is important in the always-on world, nobody has unlimited resources. So, you need to first figure out what factors are most important to your customer service effort, then make a plan for how to measure those metrics, and then put the procedures in place to leverage that data to make improvements where needed.

“The solution is to identify which of your agents’ actions – your key performance indicators – make the biggest impact on the bottom line and to implement a quality assurance program that tells you whether (and to what degree) your agents are performing those behaviors,” says Scorebuddy Co-founder Dick Bourke in this recent article. “For many call centers, that’s best accomplished by monitoring calls and using a scorecard to evaluate performance.”

What gets measured gets done, notes Bourke. That’s both because it provides hard data to allow you to know what’s happening and act on it, and because it sends a message to the team that these are the metrics that matter, he adds.

“Monitoring carefully selected KPIs encourages employee behavior that supports your objectives and discourages behavior that works against those objectives,” writes Bourke.

Not only can measuring KPIs such as time spent on calls or first call resolution success enable an organization to do more targeted agent training, it can also help an organization to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance, Bourke says.

“PCI (News - Alert)-DSS standards, for example, regulate the collection and storage of payment information,” notes Bourke of Dublin, Ireland-based Scorebuddy. “Something as simple as jotting down a credit card number to enter later could – if it ever came to light – result in hefty fines. And when the European Union’s GDPR goes into effect in May of 2018, businesses that have even a single customer in the EU will have a slew of additional regulations to worry about.”