Agents are part of the value equation

Many stakeholders must combine and interact to make a successful company. These includes employees, management, customers, vendors, business partners, and investors. So, when we look at contact center agents, whose actions affect many of these stakeholders, we are not just looking at the cost of the calls they handle, but also the value (or cost) of the interactions they have within the system of stakeholders. This tells us clearly that we need measures for evaluating, training, and incenting agents that are in synch with the higher level goals of the company.

Many measures today are flawed proxies for company goals, and often focus too rigidly on cost containment. Driving business processes by over-weighting a single-dimensional measure, such as average handling time (AHT), causes side effects that negatively impact the equally important goals of customer retention and revenue growth. This blog will contain my observations, news links, and other posts related to improving contact center performance.