Productivity is important in any work setting, but it can often be hard to measure thanks to several roadblocks. Without the right information, it can be almost impossible to see where your gaps are, uncover opportunities for your business, and empower your teams through quantifiable successful outcomes.
For back offices and contact centres, where there are often silos or deep divides between departments, it’s crucial to adopt the correct measures and reporting capabilities to see the whole picture.
So how can you start measuring your productivity effectively and build out your reporting capabilities as you mature?
Most businesses only measure lagging metrics
Both contact centres and back offices are unique in the ways that they work, and the productivity measures applied to each. Unfortunately, they can both experience challenges in measuring and reporting.
When it comes to measuring, it’s the lagging metrics that are most commonly measured. Lagging measures are those that tell you what you’ve achieved – for example, a task was done in 30 minutes. Sure, completing a task quickly is a great measure of productivity but was the customer any closer to their desired outcome after those 30 minutes or were they left frustrated and waiting for someone else to help them?
For back offices, the way they work can be a big roadblock to measuring and reporting. Because tasks often spin off into several others (for example, a bank processing a mortgage will need several people to do paperwork, run checks, approve it, and then communicate with the client), the business will rely on multiple individuals to record data – but those individuals may not be aware of how their role fits into the larger project and thus may not be recording the right data.
For contact centres, while the technology to measure is there, they may not be measuring the right information. Most contact centres will measure the handle time, turnaround time, and speed to answer without taking into consideration whether this is the data they really need and whether it’s relevant to the final desired outcome.
It’s clear that lagging measures aren’t really helping businesses understand their true productivity and efficiency.
Why are lagging measures not enough on their own?
For both these business models, lagging measures may be useful in understanding the process of particular tasks or projects, but they’re not able to help position these tasks or projects as part of the whole picture.
This leads to businesses being unable to wholly understand how each department contributes to the strategy, where the business is in its journey, as well as how customers really feel or what their true experience with the business is.
This impacts how well the business performs, and how quickly a business can react to or pivot based on new information.
This can also be quite demoralising for employees that don’t understand their purpose in the business or in the customer’s journey, nor do they see the final outcome for the customers they serve.
The roadblocks to measuring and reporting
A number of factors can create roadblocks to accurate measuring and reporting, which holds businesses back from adopting newer, leading measures.
These roadblocks include:
- Lacking the right knowledge – understanding what and how to measure takes expertise and experience, so businesses without people that have this are uncertain of how to measure or what to measure.
- Lacking the right processes – if businesses try to implement processes but lack the right knowledge, they may not get it right. And without processes in place to measure, track, and analyse the productivity data, it won’t get done as these tasks fall to the side.
- Lacking the right technology – many back offices don’t have the technology to accurately measure each task or project, thanks to not having the right knowledge and processes, leading to employees entering data manually. Unfortunately, the manual nature of this can lead to delays or be full of mistakes.
This cycle will continue as businesses try and fail to improve their reporting and find it either too hard, too complicated, or too time-intensive to get off the ground properly.
So how can businesses start overcoming these roadblocks? The best way to start is to understand what needs to be measured and building your process and systems around it.
What leading metrics should businesses really be measuring?
Businesses should be adopting leading measures to track their productivity and efficiency – in addition to the lagging ones that they currently track. Leading measures are those that can tell you where your business, customer, and department is on a particular journey.
When it comes to measuring business outcomes, ask yourself:
- What measures would tell me whether or not I’m improving the business?
- What measures would tell me whether or not I’m supporting the business?
- What measures would tell me whether or not I’m in strategic alignment with the business?
And for the customer side, it’s asking:
- Did we solve your entire request or problem?
- How well did your agent understand the product or service?
- Would you recommend our organisation?
And when businesses start looking at what leading metrics to track, it becomes obvious that answering somebody’s query within 20 seconds probably isn’t the strategic benefit or strategic need of the organisation. Achieving a real outcome to their request is.
The journey to improving your reporting capabilities
Once you start to understand what data and metrics to track, you can begin to improve your processes and find the right technology to utilise in capturing that data.
We have over 100 collective years helping teams improve their productivity through providing back office and contact centre solutions. Over the last 30 years we’ve seen a maturity scale emerge as businesses grow and progress:
- No capability – entry level businesses will be capturing data manually
- Isolated capability – slightly more mature businesses will be using technology but it will be isolated with a system and will need to be taken out manually
- Strategic capability – mature businesses will align their data and systems to the business strategy and create third-party areas where they put all that information into and integrate it and report on it.
- World-class capability – the highly mature businesses will take data from each department to put together with the rest of the organisation
Where do you see your business on this maturity scale currently?
Better reporting leads to better outcomes and more empowered teams
We live in a data-centric world, and the more of it we have the more we can understand about our position, our customers, and our results.
This will help businesses:
Close gaps
With better reporting, companies may be alerted to some glaring gaps in their business. And while it’s never pleasant to discover vulnerabilities, it’s the first step in being able to identify the cause and find a solution to them.
Pivot
The right data can tell you whether a product or service is doing well or if there are new trends that you should be paying attention to. This gives your business the foresight it needs to pivot in a new direction or put more resources behind one area. This competitive advantage will come in handy in any situation.
Empower your teams
Employees want to feel that they’re contributing and being useful in their roles. And once better reporting capabilities are put into place, it becomes much easier for your teams to understand the role they play in the company and whether their customers are getting the outcomes they want.
It’s never too late to understand your business better
Most businesses know that they need the right reporting capabilities and the right data to measure – but it’s not an easy journey to put the processes, systems, and measures into place without the right experience.
If you feel that this is an area that your business should be prioritising, Omada One can help you build out these capabilities so that your business can thrive better in today’s disruptive and demanding world.
You can reach out to our team to discuss your needs and situation so we can work with you to find a solution.
