It’s important for contact centers and back offices to measure productivity – after all, there needs to be a way for your business to better understand its capabilities and uncover any gaps or opportunities.
But while most organizations have some system or process of measuring, there are now questions around whether these measures are accurate or useful. With technology and mindsets progressing, have your KPIs done so as well?
In these insights, we’ll discuss what current measures organizations are taking, whether these are causing more problems than they’re solving, and the modern way of thinking that could lead to better outcomes and profit growth.
How are organizations currently measuring their productivity?
Currently, contact centers and most back offices are commonly measuring a series of KPIs:
- AHT (Average Handle Time)
- ASA (Average Speed to Answer)
- ATA (Average Turnaround Time)
These measures are built on a “headcount” mentality that doesn’t consider any nuance or personalization in the service being provided. And by applying these blanket measures across the different services that contact centers and back offices provide, agents are being held to standards they either can’t meet or must sacrifice care and diligence to do so.
Unfortunately, this headcount mentality means that organizations could end up with:
Inaccurate data
While a company can work towards a faster AHT, it may not be the right metric to be looking at within its specific customer journey. Agents working quicker doesn’t guarantee that customers are getting successful outcomes.
This results in bad data around customer service and outcomes, so organizations are unaware of their gaps and can’t improve their outcomes.
Low customer satisfaction
Businesses may want to stick to their customer service KPIs, but as agents try their best to meet unrealistic deadlines, they lose any nuance in interaction or service. Silos are also formed due to processes that create single-task teams focused only on fulfilling the specific task of their department, and customers often need to rehash their problems or needs as they move from one department to the next.
With most contact centers dealing with customers that are already unsatisfied, any extra difficulty could impact the customer’s relationship with the business.
Rising costs
While these common measures and metrics are meant to control costs, they may end up doing the opposite as customers leave and sales aren’t closed. And as organizations try to meet inaccurate KPIs, they’re forced to hire more people to do so – all leading to higher costs without profit.
Why is this happening and what needs to change?
Many businesses are very hesitant to change their contact center solutions and back-office productivity measures because of how deeply entrenched they are in current processes or systems.
But questions around whether their processes and systems are serving them well should be raised. And this often requires a fundamental shift in mindset.
So how can organizations approach productivity in better ways that improve their processes, optimize their back offices, break down silos, and achieve better customer outcomes?
The 3-step method to measuring productivity that improves your outcomes
As we work with organizations to empower their teams and increase productivity without raising their costs, we’re seeing the adoption of a more nuanced mindset when it comes to how teams fulfill their roles.
This shift in mindset leads businesses on a 3-step journey to improve their outcomes by:
1. Looking at the customer journey
Businesses are taking a step back and looking at their customer journeys to shape their processes and productivity measures. By journey mapping, organizations can put their customers at the center of their processes. This new approach, however, must be outcome-based and consider the outcome for the customer rather than the number of people or departments it takes to process the customer through each transaction or “level”.
2. Changing internal processes
Once organizations start structuring their measures around their customer journeys and indeed the customer outcomes, their internal processes and systems change for the better. A team approach is utilized, rather than relying on single-skill teams. Silos are slowly broken down as employees get more visibility on the entire customer journey and can create faster and better outcomes.
3. Adopting further progressive measures
Outcome-based approaches enable organizations to be more agile and adaptive in their processes. Once a business starts increasing the diversity of thinking around productivity, it becomes much easier to evolve as needed.
This results in organizations adopting more progressive measures (“Did we achieve the outcome you were looking for?”) rather than constantly relying on lagging ones (“Did your agent understand your request or product well?” or “Would you recommend our organization?”).
Realize the positive results of an outcome-based approach
The outcome-based approach to measuring productivity and optimizing back offices has numerous benefits for your businesses, and it all starts with improved customer satisfaction.
With processes and measures putting the customer at the center, customers have a far more positive experience with your organization. This results in increased loyalty and fewer leaks, as well as:
- Empowered employees as they have more proactive, positive, and personalized interactions with customers;
- Scalability of outcomes as organizations can now train their people to reach them faster without necessarily needing to increase headcount; and
- Cost reductions as fewer customers and prospects leak, current employees are better utilized, and fewer resources are spent on unnecessary hires.
Is it time to improve your own team’s productivity?
It can be difficult to build a business case for change in any business thanks to silos and hesitations around making changes. But this means that you could have massive gaps or opportunities that aren’t being seen.
The Omada One team has over thirty years of experience working with organizations that are caught in an unproductive cycle and have created a process that helps organizations find better ways to improve their productivity and empower their teams.
If you’ve started suspecting that there are better ways to measure your productivity or want to know how to reduce leakage and unnecessary costs, you can start a conversation with our friendly team to discuss how we can help you find the right solution.
