What Metrics Predict Contact Center Success?

How do you know if your contact center is going to accomplish its goals for the year?

Ensuring contact center success requires you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to measure progress and effectiveness. Some metrics are predictive and are used to help you anticipate and move toward your desired outcomes. Others are reflective and will indicate whether or not you achieved the results you hoped. In FranklinCovey’s book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, these are referred to as lag and lead measures.

Leading and Lagging Indicators 

It's important to understand the difference between these two types of metrics and the role they play in helping you coach and guide your team toward success. It's a common challenge for contact center leaders to get fixated on their end goals without a clear plan and incremental way of measuring whether or not they're on track to meet objectives. By differentiating between lag and lead measures, and taking a bias toward measuring and acting on leading indicators, you'll achieve two positive outcomes.

1. You'll find that your employees are more engaged with and connected to their impact on goals and objectives; and
2. You'll hit your lag metrics with greater consistency and predictability.

These are two things that any effective leader would want to see more often. 

How Lag and Lead Measures Predict Contact Center Success

Let's take a look at the difference between lag and lead measures and how they play out in the contact center.

Lag Measures

Lag measures are the results you want to achieve, such as customer satisfaction scores or contact center performance against specific service-level agreements. These are important to track because they show whether or not you are meeting your goals. However, they don't necessarily help you understand how to get there.

Lead Measures

Lead measures, on the other hand, are the activities that you can control that will result in the desired outcomes. 

For example, if contact center agents are struggling to meet customer expectations, a lead measure would be the number of training hours they receive or the number of quality assurance (QA) monitored calls they receive. By focusing on these activities, you can help move the needle on your lag measures.

Act on the Lead Measures via FranklinCovey

There are a few things to keep in mind when selecting lead measures:

1. Lead measures should be predictive of the desired outcomes. In other words, if you want your contact center to improve customer satisfaction scores, you need to choose lead measures that have a direct impact on customer interactions, such as the time you spend training agents on a new process or the emphasis you place on metrics that might be in direct conflict with achieving first contact resolution (I'm looking at you, average handle time).
2. Lead measures should be actionable. This means that you should be able to coach and guide employees based on the results of the lead measures. For example, if you see that agents are not navigating a process most effectively, you should provide clear steps that will help them improve.
3. Lead measures should be motivating. This is important because you want your employees to be engaged in the lead measures and see the impact they have on the contact center's success. Choose lead measures that employees can affect and are tied to the organization's mission, vision, and values.

Implementing Leading Indicators and Lagging Indicators 

Once you've selected your lead measures, there are a few steps you should take in rolling them out to your team. First, make sure that everyone is aware of what they are and how they impact the contact center's success. 

This means that contact center managers need to be able to interpret the results and coach agents on how to improve. Second, create a plan for how you will measure and track the lead measures. This will help ensure that you are making progress toward your desired outcomes. 

Finally, make sure that employees are held accountable to meeting the goals associated with the lead measures. This can be done through regular check-ins or providing feedback based on the results of the lead measures.

In summary, taking a bias toward measuring and acting on lead measures is essential for contact center success. This means selecting KPIs that are predictive of desired outcomes, actionable, and motivating for employees. By doing so, you'll engage your team and hit your lag metrics with greater consistency.

It's important to note that not all contact centers will have the same lag and lead measures. The most important thing is to identify which ones are most important for YOUR contact center and focus on those.

What KPIs do you track in your contact center? Do you find them helpful in predicting success? Let us know by sharing your top metrics with us on Linkedin or Twitter.

Justin Robbins is a researcher, educator, and advisor who’s spent the past two decades helping businesses define and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Justin is currently the Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Evangelism at UJET, where he leads the Public Relations, Analyst Relations, Customer Marketing, and Thought Leadership programs.