Myths of Contact Center (CC) Benchmarking
Many times people ask me to share the CC benchmark data/ metrics which may be asked by customer care executives / organization for comparison to gauge how their CC operations are performing. It is very important to have comparable metrics to have the confidence to say we need to make some changes or our performance is not up to the mark. But, are we also looking and considering the factors/methods behind the collection of metrics to find the correct reason for the gap?
After doing lots of research and hours of study, I am unable to find any single or specific report to co-relate or refer. All the benchmarking reports vary not only with respect to the research companies, but also depend on many other factors apart from what was being measured and how it was being measured.
Apart from the research reports, the benchmarking is also carried out by comparing with the selected industry leaders in similar field, considering all the apple-to-apple sort of integrity conditions. However, one thing we forget to consider does our CC / organization and CC industry leaders share the same objective and processes? If not, then I don’t think we are doing justice to the benchmarking. Consider, for example, Average call handling time (AHT) for your CC is 10 minutes but the industry average is of 6 minutes. We can conclude from these numbers that agents are doing a poor job - they should speed up and handle more calls. Or we might conclude that agents are doing a good job, taking their time to answer/handle the entire customer query effectively hence increasing the customer satisfaction. Either of the conclusions could be correct and best suited based on there business strategy and objectives.
So, how or which research reports to use or with which industry data/metrics to compare from the diverse, complex and mature market for doing benchmarking exercise? As per my understanding, we should know or consider following factors before selecting any report/metrics for benchmarking of your CC:
1) How & from whom, the researchers gathered the metrics
2) Should support same geography & location
3) When the metrics/ data were collected and during which time period
4) The size, maturity and type (Sales, service etc.) of CC matches with your CC
5) Should support similar Domain (Telecom, banking, manufacturing etc.)
6) Should have similar type of customer based on urgency or type of service
7) Should be identical in type of call (inbound, outbound etc.) handling
8) Should have similar sort of mix-skill of agents and supervisor
9) Should have similar technology in CC
10) Should support identical number of contact channels (voice, email, etc.) used in CC
11) Should also consider Business objective
12) Should have all the key performance metrics to benchmark
While selecting the report/ metrics, these factors, if considered, could really help us to ensure accuracy of benchmarking of Contact Centers.
