6 Steps to Align Contact Center KPIs with Customer Experience Strategies

This article orginally appeared on the Genesys Blog on February 14, 2013.

Does your organization have a Customer Experience strategy? And, have you implemented either Net Promoter or Customer Effort Scores?

Like most managers, you might feel these metrics provide value to your organization. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. At the same time, you are not sure who or what is in control. A recent article published by Forrester Research challenges these type of one question metrics as it’s hard understand how to influence it.

This process is similar to measuring your blood pressure or body temperature. You can see the score, but determining the cause requires more analysis.

In the early days of call centers, we used pseudo metrics to determine if customers would be happy with the service provided. Metrics such as Service Level, Abandoned Rate and Average Time to Answer were all created to tell us the service was good enough against the corresponding budget spend. But strong operational metrics do not always equate to a good customer experience.

I recently hosted a webinar on this topic and discussed how companies can better align their contact center KPIs with customer experience strategies. We polled the audience by asking them: What metric do you use to measure customer experience and loyalty? An overwhelming 51% cited Customer Satisfaction, followed by Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort with 26% and 17% respectively.

Regardless of what metric is utilized, most companies fail at KPI alignment for a variety of reasons—most notably the challenge of leveraging one measure across multiple entities and employee skill sets. Companies need to carefully assess how their operational contact center metrics truly influences customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, and increased wallet share. The six steps to aligning KPIs and metrics throughout the customer service organization include:

1. Determine your Customer Experience metric (Customer Sat, NPS or CES)
2. Select your operational KPI’s like the ones mentioned earlier.
3. Add other sources of data you suspect influence customer experience.
4. Correlate these metrics for a set time.
5. Start to focus on the components that correlate with higher customer experience scores.
6. Learn if the statistical correlation also works in real life.

Contact centers can better achieve their goals by aligning Key Performance Indicators across their entire organization and customer experience framework. For most companies, aligning these KPIs across an organization can be a daunting task. Contact center managers must thoughtfully consider the measurement metrics and activities that will help them achieve their long-term goals and objectives. I invite you to learn more about this important topic by watching the replay of my recent webinar, Aligning Contact Center Metrics with Your Customer Experience Strategy.

 Stefan Captijn has over 20 years of experience in the IT and Customer Service business, Stefan has an unusual mix of experience having served in IT, Consulting, Marketing and Business Development roles. Stefan started with Genesys in 2000 and currently Stefan focusses on the Genesys Workload Management product line. Stefan has a passion for running, cycling, loudspeaker building and enjoys public speaking and travelling the world.

Stefan can be followed on twitter @stefancaptijn