This guest blog is courtesy of:
Stephen Irecki  @sirecki
Director, Global Customer Operations
Prophecy International
Twitter – LinkedIn – Website

How do you measure effectiveness and efficiency in your contact center? Or even in your organization? I ask these questions every single day to our customers and the answers that I receive back are always very different.

The truth is, there is no one answer. There is no silver bullet for measuring how effective a contact center is at achieving its operational goals. It depends on Multiple factors that differ based on industry vertical and customer needs.

Analyzing these multiple factors using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a great start. A KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effective a contact center is at achieving its key business objectives. But in order to define and measure a KPI, you first need to have access to the relevant underlying data.

The great news is that data is plentiful. So much data is available these days from various platforms and systems, but the bad news is that data is often locked-down and isolated in its presentation.

You can have the best contact center solution in the world, yet it only presents you with siloed contact center specific Dashboards and reports. What about your organization’s sales data, product data, ticketing data, headset data, etc…? Where is all this information stored? Can it be accessed, aggregated and correlated with your contact center data? Are you able to create KPI’s that span multiple data sources, providing better insight into what is actually going on in your contact center?

The answer is… yes you can.

So many supervisors, managers and decision-makers measure effectiveness and efficiency in their contact center using a single one-dimensional KPI such as Service Level (SLA) or Average Speed of Answer (ASA). In most cases, these KPI’s are not representative of the company’s business objectives or organizational goals. These KPI’s only give one side to the story, but the story is so much richer and deeper than anyone can ever imagine. And this rich and deep story is usually never told or visualized… until now.

eMite is seeing some remarkable visual story telling happening in our growing customer base. One customer of ours, who runs an outbound sales contact center, uses KPI’s such as ‘Agent revenue per minute of talk time’ and ‘Number of sales per call’, enabling them to provide engagement and motivation to their sales teams. Their contact center dashboards include gamification elements that correlate contact center data with Salesforce sales data, increasing agent efficiency and effectiveness.

Another customer of ours cares deeply about their customer experience. Call quality is of upmost importance to them, so they correlate acoustic incident data from their agent’s headsets with customer survey results. This enables them to identify issues around agent over-talk, unusual mute times, or even rogue agents who disconnect their headsets in order to pretend there is a fault on the line. As a result, they have experienced increased customer satisfaction because of the insight they now have into their acoustic data correlated with their customer survey data.

My favorite example is of an eMite customer who runs an IT service desk. They have created their own in-house ‘contact center score’ – a single metric which is a product of several different KPI’s (each with their own weighting) such as Service Level, ASA, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and ticket resolution time, correlated together to provide a single number ranging from 0 to 10 for each of their contact center queues. They use this single number to run their whole service desk operations and it is the only number that matters to them. To have such understanding of their contact center operations is remarkable in itself, but to have the ability to calculate this complex ‘contact center score’ on-the-fly and in real-time is priceless.

Having a next generation Business Intelligence (BI) platform like eMite, that enables real-time visualization of correlated data from multiple sources, has allowed these organizations to elevate their contact center KPI’s and dashboards to the executive level. Contact Center dashboards are now organizational dashboards. And these organizational dashboards are being viewed throughout the business, right on up to the C-Level.

About eMite

eMite is a subsidiary of ASX listed Prophecy International Holdings Limited (ASX: PRO). The eMite operational intelligence platform combines analytics, correlation, capacity, performance, availability, and KPI management into a single, out of the box solution to provide customers with real time insight. For more information visit https://emite.com.

AVDS is proud to be an eMite partner helping our clients correlate and combine data from multiple business sources to get actionable insight in seconds, not months! Let us show you how!