Modern Metrics: New Measurements for the Contact Centre of the Future.

Metrics are the language of contact centres. Traditionally they have focused on cost control – measuring how long calls take, how many calls are transferred or how many calls result in a resolution.

Very few of the metrics in use have been optimistic or positive in nature, and apart from the largest contact centres, very few metrics have been integrated with other corporate data sources.

One of the hidden benefits of a cloud based contact centre is that they are often pre-integrated with other cloud based applications. This gives you some exciting opportunities to start measuring some new metrics in your contact centre!

The important thing to remember as we work through our suggestions is that metrics are no good on their own! Metrics are there to be used to support your decision making. If you aren’t going to change your behaviour based on what you learn then there is little point in reporting them.

Leads per minute of call time

Your telemarketing team might be receiving or making calls in order to qualify sales opportunities to pass over to your sales team. You probably already measure the number of leads per person each month – but do you know how long each team member spends on the phone to get those leads?

What training would you offer if you knew your best performers werespending longer on the right calls ormore swiftly qualifying out the wrong calls?

Pipeline created per minute of call time

Your telemarketing and sales teams are incentivised to take leads or opportunities and turn them into qualified pipeline. The question business leaders always ask is – what behaviours do our best people exhibit and can we train the rest of our team to do the same?

Historically sales managers have declared “Make more calls – it’s a numbers game!” But is it? Do your best sales people spend more time researching? Do they spend more time preparing for each call and make sure that each call lasts longer and moves the sales forward? Do your best sales people feel more comfortable asking wider qualifying questions and broaden the value of the deal?

Revenue closed per minute of call time

Across an enterprise sales process there might be 20 calls or more encompassing many hours of conversation. Do you know what differences exist between the sales processes that are successful and those that are not?

Do you know when the average deal closes in terms of call time? How far over that optimum would you still encourage your sales teams to keep speaking with prospects? What trends can you pick out comparing your best sales people to your poor performers? What training would you provide based on what you’ve learned?

Best time to call

“Calling-time” often covers the main working day – perhaps with telemarketing happy hours at 10-11am and 2-3pm – but is that really the best time to call? When are you most likely to see an opportunity progress to the next stage? When do your top performers make their calls?

If you knew that your top performers are most successful at 8.30 and 5.30 when their prospects are less likely to be focused on other things would that affect your decision making? Would you change your team’s hours of work or look at a home working strategy?

Best time between calls

There is a balance to be achieved between over-calling prospects and leaving them to forget you. But what is that balance? What do your best performers do? Could you learn the optimal time between calls and use that to generate reminders automatically in your CRM system if thresholds are hit? Can you learn which opportunities in your pipeline are over that threshold and kick off a telemarketing campaign to support your sales team?

Summary

Modern metrics can give business leaders the information they need to make better business decisions. Combining these metrics with call recording can give managers fantastic insight into what the best performers are doing and give great training material to the rest of the team.

Have you linked your contact centre and CRM reporting? What decisions have you been able to take because of what you have learned? We’d love to hear your comments here on the blog.