High-Performance Contact Center

Frost & Sullivan notes three criteria that distinguish top-performing contact centers from the average performers:

• The contact center and the enterprise work in tandem to balance cost controls with efforts to realistically measure service quality. It is not enough to simply declare a policy of valuing the customer experience. In a high-performing center, specific goals and objectives must be set for achieving realistic customer experience benchmarks within the context of an efficient allocation of resources;

• Individual front-line workers are set clear performance goals, and those goals are constructed to reflect actual business objectives. These can be expressed in traditional call center telephony metrics (hold time, calls handled, etc.), but they must originate in or be aligned with organizational goals (profits, revenue, customer retention and churn, etc.); and

• The flow of information into and out of the center is controlled and channeled so that appropriate managers and analysts can interpret the raw data and use it to create specific prescriptions for change that improve performance. This can include an emphasis on root-cause analysis, scenario simulation, and the proactive creation of responses before deep problems can fester.

Source: DestinationCRM.com