Step 2 to Improve Contact Center Hiring Process - Understand Performance Metrics

Understand which performance metrics relate employee performance to achieving the desired business outcomes

See our previous Blog post: Step 1: Understand and define the desired business outcomes

Step 2: understand what performance metrics provide needed insight

Hiring managers need to understand what performance metrics provide the insight into whether the employee is meeting the desired business outcomes or not. The key is to make sure that alignment between the business outcomes and performance metrics exists. The performance metrics link the contact center representative’s performance against the business outcomes. For example:

To drive additional top line revenue

If the business outcome is to drive additional top line revenue, then a sales yield performance metric might be critical to measure and track.

To reduce customer churn to protect existing revenue

If the business outcome is to reduce customer churn to protect existing revenue, then performance metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), issue resolution, or first call resolution are important to measure and track.

To reduce operating costs

If the business outcome is to reduce operating costs, then managing average handle time is an important business metric to measure and track.

2 Advantages of Contact Center Performance Metrics

The contact center has two huge advantages in this area. First, contact centers track a number of metrics related to agent performance. Second, contact centers typically have large groups of people doing the same work which improves the sample size for modeling purposes. However, often hiring managers will not spend the time focusing on the critical performance metrics that drive the desired business outcomes. A side benefit of going through this discussion is that it forces Operations, HR, and Training to be in agreement. Gaining alignment between these three functional groups reduces barriers to achieving great hiring results.

In our next post, we’ll discuss step 3: Understand and define the job families