All eyes on metrics: using data to drive performance

If your business is working with call center vendors, you have to provide constant oversight to ensure that those vendors are managing their business to your expectations. Keeping a close eye on metrics allows you to accurately monitor performance and then set clear expectations based on what you learn from the data.

Imagine a sales group that is running advertisements all over the country in different formats. Every time a commercial airs, it generates hundreds of calls – and if the sales group is supporting several lines of business, perhaps thousands of calls at peak hours.

For the call centers taking those calls, the most important thing is to convert as many calls as possible into sales. The stakes in sales are high because many times the product being sold is not a necessity for the caller – in all likelihood, it will be our only chance to turn that caller into a customer. From a sales standpoint, it’s “now or never.”

Good metrics are essential to helping sales call centers maintain a clear focus on what matters most: converting calls into sales. This is because metrics are the key to driving the behavior needed to maximize revenue.

Drilling down: the value of intraday metrics
Daily metrics aren’t enough. To accurately measure performance and drive improvement, you also need break the day down into segments.

Thirty-minute intervals are fairly typical for many types of call center environments, and some direct sales groups are moving toward metrics based on 15-minute and even 5-minute intervals – with an emphasis on the 5-minute segments that coincide with the airing of their toll-free number.

Regardless of how the day is segmented, here’s why intraday metrics are so important: call center sales agents may be having good days overall, but when you look closer, you may see that agents are actually doing very well for half the day, which is making up for the fact that their performance the other half of the day is subpar. Once you uncover a pattern of behavior like this, you can ask questions to find out what’s really going on. You can remove barriers and create incentives for stronger performance throughout the day.

Intraday metrics allow you to understand what’s going on under the surface and get a more complete picture of performance and where there is room for improvement. In a sales environment, that translates directly into opportunities for increased revenue.

–Kathleen Alloune

Kathleen Alloune is Executive Director of Operations for CXO Global Solutions.