How to build contact center dashboards that drive improved performance

Updated: June 05, 2009

Background and Disclosures

While I currently head Focus Research in an official capacity, I spent a number of years in product and marketing roles at a sales and service performance management company called Merced Systems (yes, I still own my options there). Although I don't officially cover contact center performance management (CCPM) here at Focus, I wanted to provide some advice on how to design the right dashboards for those implementing any type of performance reporting. While have not worked within a contact center, I have been involved in the implementation of contact center performance management at more than 20 Global 2000 companies.

CCPM and CCPM Dashboards Defined

I define CCPM systems as domain-specific software applications that uniquely combine dashboarding, analytics, workflow and data integration to:

  • Allow management to set performance goals for an a contact center organization
  • Roll out personalized versions of these goals to every agent in the organization
  • Provide agents and management with daily (or even intraday) progress dashboards and reports against these goals
  • Supply agents and management with various performance management workflows -- such as for incentive management adjustments, coaching tools, performance improvement planning, best practices capture, -- to standardize organizational response to performance trends.

Dashboards are a center piece to any performance management system. While there are many types of dashboards there are two primary dashboard types that are typically created within an organization

  1. The balanced performance dashboard: This dashboard provides any user - both individual agents and group managers and executives at a glance insight into every metric that determine their overall performance. By necessity the dashboard will have different metrics (quality, efficiency, productivity, CSAT, schedule adherence, ect.) personalized to the individual and their role.
  2. The campaign dashboard: This dashboard presents everybody in the organization current performance against a focused initiative, such as customer satisfaction improvement or handle time reduction.

In most organization, both types of dashboard are used at the same time to enable executation against major intiatives while maintaining an overall balanced performanced.

The following document details the steps needed to ensure you create the right dashboards.

Step 2: Define your single most important improvement initiative as well

Often there is one thing your contact center can do that falls inline with high level corproate initatives, such as improving customer satisfaction or reducing employing attrition. Often you will want to dedicate a separate dashboard at all levels of your organization as well as potentially change the weighting of your balanced performance.

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Step 3: Attach metrics to your initiatives

This is probably the most difficult step. Contact center are often awash in data. You need to pick a single metrics that represents the component of performance you're looking at.

For example, attaching a metric to customer satisfaction could include

  • Quality survey results: Ratings of customer satisfaction by the QA evaluator
  • Quality survey results: Ratings of customer satisfaction by the QA evaluator