Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Contact Centre KPIs: Why it's so important to set your own goals, rather than follow the flock.

A DIGITAL ISLAND WHITEPAPERWritten by: Kelly Brickley, Solutions Consultant, Digital Island

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Contents

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness 3

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19 4

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards 4

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand 6

Your business, your KPIs 7

The human cost of KPIs and technology 9

The wrap 10

About the author 11

About Digital Island 11

That's why having the right KPIs (and the right technology) in place is critical.

Which leads us to industry standards and why they can be a double-edged sword. While every contact centre essentially does the same thing, i.e. provides customer service, processes work requests, etc., every contact centre is also unique. You have your own product and service set, and your customers tend to fall into speci�c categories – demographic, geographic or otherwise.

Although industry-standard KPIs are a valuable guide, following them blindly may not be the right strategy for running an e�cient and cost-e�ective contact centre that provides an outstanding customer experience.

When setting your own KPIs, you can run with the flock, or take a lone wolf stance and focus on what matters to your business alone. That is, what works for your customers, and what you can a�ord and realistically achieve

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

“…but just 25.6% of organisations ensure employees understand the big picture, the direction of the business and how they plan to get there.” 2 Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (andagent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standardbenchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes(because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly ande�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are lesssatis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss ofpositive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' aboutAHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internalworkload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live anddie by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you processyour inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don'tlanguish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rstcall. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agentson at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets andresources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time ofnational crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility isrequired to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy sharedspace to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, andrealign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technologytools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, manyorganisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rstcontact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to lookfor patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types ofinteractions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in anddetermine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up untilthe last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are luckyenough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, ifyou connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards givesmeaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

Failure to use information is a primary reason CX systems fail.

To establish which insights are required by the business to achieve the required outcomes, it’s critical to determine the key measures and data points that will provide a clear line of sight back to the business strategy, and the people who monitor and make decisions on these insights.2 For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed

and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What ifyour agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer historypop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especiallypowerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, andyou achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer'ssatisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply thatlens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve.

And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directlyreflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – andits success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’dbe rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answeredwithin 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by manycontact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overlyexpensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speedof answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to waitbetween one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service toolsshould have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previousyears." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving andcompleting calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre andhuman error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agentsatisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agentsbecome frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to workremotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, andidentify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understandand achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and addressthe issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physicallydispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to lookclosely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li�their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIscan be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-checkwhether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilitiesof your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the marketdemand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX serviceswere introduced to complement the existing services, andthese were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunicationsand ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation ofproviding a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the DigitalIsland of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, DigitalIsland continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, andinnovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clientsacross New Zealand, including many great brands like RedBull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communicationsspecialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel poweredcloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle ofcloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional andmanaged services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience.

Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, andthe future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom'scustomer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequentlyspanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which hastaken her from agent to a highlyrespected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industrybody, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ(Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre ManagersNetworking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a SolutionsConsultant in 2021.

Which of the following contact centre technology challenges are you currently facing / do you imminatly expect to face?3Channels are not uni�ed, hindering 360-degree views & omnichannel CX

44.68%Insu�cient or unsuccessful use of automation and AI

35.46%Tools require high levels of agent e�ort, such as requiring them to look at multiple screens

33.33%Disconnect between goals of IT team and goals of contact centre/CX team

31.91%

Systems not uni�ed across the enterprise28.37%

Contact center/CX team has limited influence over technology decisions26.42%

Limited access to data and reporting24.82%

Di�cult to add new features / incompatible with emerging apps and channels23.40%

Agents and/or customers can’t consistently access systems from all devices19.15%

Agents can’t consistently access systems from home/remote locations18.44%

Cannot easily upgrade/scale exisiting systems to accommodate changing sta� counts, contact volume, etc17.73%

Security/data protection is ine�cient or ine�ective13.48%

Di�cult to maintain11.35%

Our systems are incompatible with those used by partners or outsourcing �rms 9.93%

Systems don’t collect enough data about customer and agent behaviour/sentiment/etc31.91%

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

“For now, less than half (47.3%) consider customer satisfaction data as a key measurement on the e�ective-ness of technology projects.”2

Just measuring is not enough – that’s something everyone can do. Distinguish yourself by letting the numbers support the CX strategy.

Think carefully about the desired experience and the KPIs associated with speed-to-answer and handle-time metrics. The KPIs should give the right direction to employees and support the CX strategy across all channels.2

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (andagent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standardbenchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes(because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly ande�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are lesssatis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss ofpositive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' aboutAHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internalworkload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live anddie by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you processyour inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don'tlanguish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rstcall. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agentson at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets andresources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time ofnational crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility isrequired to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy sharedspace to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, andrealign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technologytools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, manyorganisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rstcontact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to lookfor patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types ofinteractions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in anddetermine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up untilthe last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are luckyenough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, ifyou connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards givesmeaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the righttools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels ofinvestment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as yourchallenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) andMachine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�edand veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What ifyour agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer historypop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especiallypowerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, andyou achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer'ssatisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply thatlens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve.

And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directlyreflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – andits success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’dbe rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, they're using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving andcompleting calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre andhuman error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agentsatisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agentsbecome frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to workremotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, andidentify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understandand achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and addressthe issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physicallydispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to lookclosely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li�their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIscan be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-checkwhether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilitiesof your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the marketdemand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX serviceswere introduced to complement the existing services, andthese were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunicationsand ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation ofproviding a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the DigitalIsland of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, DigitalIsland continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, andinnovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clientsacross New Zealand, including many great brands like RedBull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communicationsspecialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel poweredcloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle ofcloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional andmanaged services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience.

Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, andthe future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom'scustomer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequentlyspanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which hastaken her from agent to a highlyrespected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industrybody, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ(Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre ManagersNetworking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a SolutionsConsultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.

Setting realistic KPIs to achieve customer (and agent) happiness

Average handling time (AHT) is a key contact centre metric. Over the years, most contact centres have expected their agents to adhere to a set AHT, so they can establish a standard benchmark. A�er all, if you know that your average handling time is �ve minutes, you can calculate how many agents you need to handle any number of calls on any day. And pronto, you're e�cient.

But as we all know, there's more to it than that.

First, there's a negative impact on your agents. By telling them that that calls shouldn't exceed ‘X’ minutes (because to do so will mean that you need more people and it will cost too much), it encourages them to o�load unresolved call resolution to another team to meet the business’s KPI for AHT.

You may get to tick your agents’ AHT KPI box, but the secondary impact is that your customers experience double handling of their call. And this at a time when they just want their issue handled smoothly and e�ciently, and to have it resolved quickly, by one person, the �rst time they call. Their initial investment of ‘X’ minutes with the �rst agent can be potentially doubled or tripled as they enter a 'pass the parcel' cycle. When they need to explain their issue repeatedly, it's understandable that their attitude towards your support service sours, and your NPS consequently slides downhill.

COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other 1 benchmark series, reports "The number of contacts required to resolve issues has an impact on all three of the major customer experience metrics. Top Two Box Customer Satisfaction (TTB CSAT), Customer E�ort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) all decline as the number of contacts increase,' and that 'Customers who are transferred are less satis�ed than those who are not transferred."

COPC also reports, "The strongest driver of customer satisfaction is issue resolution". So, the loss of positive customer perception is a high price to pay for rigidly adhering to a set or inadequate AHT.

If you're a contact centre manager, then setting KPIs falls on your head. And it's essential to 'get real' about AHT. Is your AHT target unrealistic? If you increase your AHT, can you decrease the volume of avoidable inbound calls made by customers checking on their unresolved issue? Will it directly impact your internal workload and cost of an unnecessary escalation?

The answer is yes.

Ironically, it may only take an adjustment of a couple of minutes to your AHT to achieve �rst call resolution (FCR). So, while you may need to trade o� a little more time and cost, your investment in improving your customer experience will likely compensate you in terms of customer happiness, value, and ultimately, retention.

Contact Digital Island.0800 999 010 Visit us at: https://digitalisland.co.nz/amazon-connect

IntroductionIf you support your customers through a contact centre, then you probably live and die by your KPIs.

Data and KPIs are critical in a contact centre environment to ensure that you process your inbound workload within a reasonable time frame, and your customers don't languish in a queue.

However, it's a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, you want to deliver your customers a high level of service. One where they don't wait too long to speak to someone, and their query, complaint or support issue is resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible – preferably on �rst call. And without being passed from pillar to post.

On the other hand, from an operational perspective, you need to maximise e�ciency. A�er all, every second that an agent engages with a customer costs you money. Every inbound (or outbound, for that matter) interaction consists of labour expenses and the dollar value of the call itself.

If you had an unlimited budget and in�nite resources, you could simply add agents on at will to address peak calling times. But in the real world, budgets and resources are both �nite. So it's essential to achieve that perfect equilibrium between customer service and your operational costs.

Dynamic adaptability to change during the time of Covid-19

If your contact centre team can't work from home during Covid-related lockdowns, or any other time of national crisis or change, then you've got a business problem of some signi�cance.

However, that's not a topic for this whitepaper.

What is though, is that it's become increasingly apparent that working-from-home o�ers bene�ts for both employer and employee – but requires more give and take. Are you asking yourself if a home or remote work environment impact your agents' ability to meet KPIs? And should you rethink your targets?

Working remotely, without the bene�t of a team leader nearby and ready to provide help, can a�ect the average handle time and occupancy rate. There's a greater requirement for agent self-su�ciency, promoting the need for the right tools and a good knowledge base. And more schedule flexibility is required to accommodate the constraints and obligations of an agent in a busy working-from-home environment. From answering the door or working around household activities, moving from a noisy shared space to a more private one, to taking a sick child to seek medical care. Or perhaps some of your agents are working in isolation, and consequently, your occupancy rate is higher than expected or even needed.

It's important to look at the environments your agents are working in, the factors that impact them, and realign your pre-Covid KPIs to reflect those changes.

Interestingly, modern cloud-based contact centre applications support the working-from-home scenario from both the employer and agent perspective more perfectly than almost any other technology. For agents, it's business as usual with a change of scenery and no travel. And for employers, contact centre technology tools provide complete, real-time visibility of what every agent is doing. You can monitor calls for quality, record every interaction, measure every KPI, giving true accountability.

In many ways, today's contact centre technology is made for this new at-home era.

The joy of meaningful real-time reporting and dashboards

Analytics is a word that brings genuine happiness to many businesses. Especially when the resulting reports are based on real-time, relevant, and accurate data. Yet, despite KPIs being fact-driven, many organisations can't view the decision-making information they need, when they need it.

Today's contact centre technology o�ers a critical di�erence. With the ability to record all calls and analyse them on the spot, rather than replay, review, and grade recordings days or even weeks later, you have essential information at your �ngertips. When you need it, and it's still fresh and meaningful.

Instead of an agent perpetuating an ongoing mistake, sentiment analysis can flag negative interactions in as they happen so that those calls can be reviewed and addressed on the spot, not a month down the track. Sentiment analysis measures call drivers or reason for the interaction, customer satisfaction, �rst contact resolution rates (FCR) and agent performance – all those KPIs that are important to your business.

For a team leader, it enables you to review agent performance, by the minute or hour, or day. You can even analyse why one call was poor, and another highly successful. All the day’s calls can be viewed, along with an overall happiness score – by agent or team. Or you can drill down into calls which rated poorly to look for patterns that can be overcome with more agent education and training.

Keyword analysis can further break down the nature of the calls, helping you decide if some types of interactions (for example, can I change my address details?) have reached a volume where self-service is a natural next step.

Real-time analytics are incredibly valuable to any contact centre. They help you improve agent performance, understand your NPS and how happy your customers are, identify what type of workloads are coming in and determine what self-service tools or process improvements will bene�t the business. And, of course, how you are tracking against your metrics – and where you should or could consider making changes.

If your contact centre isn't using dashboards to make decisions, then it should. But it must be said, up until the last few years, having the right dashboards has been easier said than done. Few businesses are lucky enough to have an in-house Power BI expert with the time, capacity, and expertise to build a custom dashboard.

The right dashboard pulls in live data from multiple sources – not just the contact centre. So, for example, if you connect sales and support, you have a far more powerful tool to analyse sales behaviours and value. With the right data and KPIs on a dashboard, you can drive the desired behaviour from the agents, keep them focused and consciously doing and saying the right things.

It's worth noting that the introduction of KPI gami�cation has proven successful in motivating agents to compete against themselves and others to achieve the highest daily targets, closing the most calls, or having the happiest customers (as reported through customer sentiment).

There’s a people payo� too. The transparency of KPIs and targets presented by dashboards gives meaningful goals to your agents, makes them feel more secure in their roles, and more invested in the success of the business.

The importance of technology, and having the right tools at hand

Contact centre technology vendors make signi�cant levels of investment in understanding the changing dynamics of the customer experience, and the tools and processes you need to keep pace. However, a good contact centre solution must be designed around your everyday business needs as well as your challenges and goals.

Modern contact centres o�er multichannel toolsets that come out of the box – augmented by Arti�cial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), they o�er your business the smarts to communicate with all your customers, the way they prefer.

So what comes �rst? A great agent or great contact centre tools and processes? The reality is that by giving your agents better tools, such as real-time agent assistance which proactively o�ers answers through a contextually correct knowledge base content, they can deliver better customer satisfaction. So you can, in turn, onboard less experienced and less costly agents and very quickly raise their performance levels to match those of your more senior team members.

For example, your agents may spend 10-20% of their day just ensuring the customer has been identi�ed and veri�ed before they can securely engage with them, and start to resolve any queries or issues. What if your agent knew who was on the line before they picked up the call, and had an integrated customer history pop up on-screen at the outset of the engagement? How would that impact their average handling time – and your KPIs? You could also consider utilising bots, knowledge-based and real-time agent assist tools to proactively provide your team with the on-the-spot information needed to improve �rst contact resolution rates.

While traditional technology will provide answers to the questions a customer asks of an agent – it will do so in the form of a range of knowledge articles which the agent must si� through. And there's no guarantee that those articles are either up-to-date or relevant.

By comparison, the knowledge-based tools found in modern, AI and machine learning-driven cloud contact centres are especially powerful. For example, a bot listening in on the customer call can feed instant and accurate information to the agent's screen during the call. As a result, the call is resolved more quickly, and you achieve both your average handling time and call resolution rate KPIs. And by resolving calls more rapidly and to a customer's satisfaction, your NPS improves.

While a plug-and-play contact centre application may do the basic job, it's not customised to help your business apply that lens to the universal end objective of all contact centres – a better NPS. And then to engineer the processes needed to help you achieve the goals, targets, and KPIs you need to improve. And of course, the KPIs you choose to measure should directly reflect the value your contact centre adds to the business – and its success.

Your business, your KPIs

So, what is the contact resolution benchmark for your industry? And should you care?

One of the most common questions asked by organisations who run contact centres, is 'what industry standard should we aim for in contact resolution?'

Bearing in mind that industry standards are guidelines, they're valuable for context. So, for example, if your contact resolution rate is 20% of all calls, and the industry standard is 60%, you’d be rightly concerned, and consider introducing new strategies to help improve your results. But that doesn't mean that 60% will

necessarily be the right goal for you as your target and budget are as individual and unique as your business. The goal should be to �ne tune your system on an ongoing basis – always improving your FCR, subsequently reducing unnecessary and costly workloads.

As an example of why it's essential to stay abreast of current research, let's look at the industry service level for call waiting time. For decades it's been 80/20. That is, 80% of customer calls should be answered within 20 seconds. But it's worth noting that while the 80/20 rule has been in widespread use by many contact centres, using a standard that was developed over three decades ago. As a result, those organisations that have used the 80/20 rule to determine resourcing levels have been building an overly expensive and rigid rod for their own backs.

Fast forward to COPC's 2020 Consumer survey, which reports that customer expectations regarding speed of answer when making contact by phone have changed – not that 80/20 was ever a fair benchmark. To quote: "15% of consumers stated they would expect their call to be answered within one minute, another 34% expected their call to be answered between 1-2 minutes, and another 26% expected their call to be answered between 2-3 minutes. 25% of consumers expect to wait longer than three minutes to get a response."

This 'new' metric throws old calculations to the wind. If up to 75% of your customers are happy to wait between one to three minutes in a queue, the resource calculation is quite di�erent. And if you embrace the 75/180 (75%, 180 seconds) rule, the impact on your operational costs will be immense.

So, again, it requires a decision about what's right for your organisation – and your customers.It also raises questions about call volumes. For example, why are your customers calling you? Could you reduce the inbound call workload (and costs) by o�ering more self-service options? Or use a bot to determine if the caller needs or wants human interaction just to update their delivery address?

It's critical to design and implement self-service tools that also enable �rst contact resolution. We tend to �rst think about �rst contact resolution from the contact centre agent perspective, but the self-service tools should have the same measure – in e�ect, their own KPIs.

While growing in popularity, self-service technology (SST) comes with customer expectations. Again, to quote the COPC Consumer report: "The reported use of SST has increased year-over-year, with almost twice as many consumers stating they tried to use SST to resolve their issues in 2020 compared to previous years." So usage increased, although customer satisfaction is still considered too low. "Although issue resolution via SST was low (at 69%), the rate has improved compared to previous years.' The good news, though, is "Satisfaction with SST seems to be increasing year-over-year (from 40% top two box satisfaction in 2018 to 60% in 2020)."

So if you enable bots to serve customers, it should have a targeted �rst contact KPI so the customer can self-resolve without necessarily escalating to an agent. And of course, if you reduce inbound call volumes, and utilise omni-channel you can a�ord to increase your average handling time KPIs, so your agents can use the time to add more value by cross- or upselling services or products.

Regardless, your targets and metrics remain critical, whether applied to agent related interactions or self-service tools. And in choosing the right technology, you can adjust and re�ne your KPIs and measure the outcomes of change in real-time.

The human cost of KPIs and technology

Your agents work for you because they like to help customers. And for most, that means resolving and completing calls.

The reality for most, is your agents represent 70% of the operational cost of running your contact centre and human error is a costly reality, both operationally and for your brand reputation. So, it’s critical they deliver maximum value to the business, and that you in turn minimise attrition.

As discussed earlier, while a necessary operational KPI, average handling time can impact agent satisfaction levels. When given too little time to resolve the average call – �rst time around – agents become frustrated. And as with all of us, not meeting targets in turn generates feelings of anxiety and job insecurity. Even though they are at the coal face of your contact centre services, targeting agents for both AHT and FCR is fundamentally fraught with pitfalls.

The employee experience – or lack of – can cost you dearly. And at a time where skilled resources are in increasingly short supply, retention is ever more critical. If your technology supports your agents to work remotely (and if it doesn't in this day and age, then why not?), then you can rapidly onboard remote agents, locally and internationally, full time or part-time.

More importantly, you can track their individual KPIs as though you were in the same physical o�ce, and identify performance issues as they happen. With every agent equipped with their own dashboard, and the team leader having a real-time view of queue activity status, it's easier for the entire team to understand and achieve goals.

On a more personal level, a team leader can also spot if an agent is struggling to meet KPIs, and address the issue.

The way contact centres are run has now changed forever. But while your agents may be physically dispersed, you can still measure performance against KPIs, and further develop your contact centre tools to achieve continuous improvement.

The wrap

Industry reports are valuable to any business that runs a contact centre. They provide a �nger on the pulse of customer expectations, and how your peers are meeting them. They highlight the changing customer journey and the role of a multi-channel approach in driving faster, more satisfactory outcomes for agents, your business, and customers.

If �rst contact resolution is your primary goal, and you want to improve by 5% per quarter, you need to look closely at everything that drives that growth. Even an incremental gain is valuable. So evaluate your systems and processes. And the tools and training you provide to enable your agents to understand and li� their performance.

While there's no industry standard for reassessing your KPIs, a quarterly review will highlight where KPIs can be �netuned to improve performance. A review will keep you abreast of technology, sense-check whether your contact centre solution is aligned with your goals, and enable continuous improvement of the customer experience.

In summary, industry KPIs are a guideline, they're not your set-in-stone business goals. There are times when only a lone wolf approach will make your contact centre performance shine. To do this, your KPIs need to reflect the nature of your business, your customers, your agents, and the capabilities of your technology.

Stand out from the flock. Transform your contact centre from a cost centre to a pro�t centre by creating meaningful KPIs that drive agent simplicity and client centricity.

1. COPC's 2020 Consumer Experiences and Opinions: A Year Like No Other2. 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report: The connected customer: delivering an e�ortless experience3. 2021 January Market study - State of contact center technology - Talkdesk

About Digital Island

Digital Island was created in 2004 in recognition of the market demand for a dedicated B2B voice/internet provider.

Our original landline-based o�ers proved immediately popular with business, and by 2008 Digital Island was crowned New Zealand’s fastest growing Tech Company in the Deloitte Fast50 Awards. Following this success, Mobile and Cloud PBX services were introduced to complement the existing services, and these were readily accepted in the market.

The complete suite of cloud-focussed Telecommunications and ISP services combined with Digital Island’s reputation of providing a fanatical client experience attracted many new clients and the company grew and developed into the Digital Island of today.

Now, as a Spark Business Group brand since 2018, Digital Island continues to go from strength to strength, while staying true to its core values of personalised service, agility, and innovation.

We advise and support thousands of longstanding clients across New Zealand, including many great brands like Red Bull, Samsung, Giltrap and Barkers who trust us to deliver reliable and customised telecommunications for their businesses.

As a leading cloud contact centre and communications specialist, we o�er Amazon Connect (AWS) and Mitel powered cloud-based telephony solutions. Both are proven to accelerate our client’s customer engagement across multiple channels.

While Digital Island o�ers a complete and robust bundle of cloud-centric business telecommunications services including cloud contact centres consultancy, and professional and managed services, we remain focussed on delivering an excellent customer experience. Like some help to design a cloud contact centre for today, and the future?

About the author, Kelly Brickley

Kelly's �rst job was at Telecom's customer service contact centre in Hamilton. In a career that subsequently spanned over 30 years, she's created a contact centre-centric career which has taken her from agent to a highly respected technology subject matter expert and solution consultant. Her experience includes ten years in the United States working for ICMI, a leading global contact centre industry body, where she developed training and provided consultative expertise.

Kelly is on the committee of CCNNZ (Customer Contact Network New Zealand), and she set up and runs her own Contact Centre Managers Networking Group.

She joined Digital Island as a Solutions Consultant in 2021.