In the world of call centers, it is crucial to understand how your agents are performing. This in turn will tell you how your call center is performing, and with this information, you can go about and make optimizations and/or improvements. Reducing costs, improving metrics, and improving customer satisfaction is key to success in any business. Typically, performance data is measured as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are crucial for understanding call center performance, however this data is considered a KPI only if it is put into context, if it isn’t, it is called KMI (Key Metric Indicators).
KMI
Performance is measured through close comparison of a baseline or goal that is set by the company in question. KMIs don’t really take this into account. For example, having an average answer time of 35 seconds, by itself, is a KMI. It doesn’t tell us much. Is that high? Is that low? How does it compare to other days or months of the year? How does this information help me if I don’t know what to do with it?
KPI
KMIs tell you something, yet they don’t paint the full picture. We need context with it. Having this KMI measured over the course of 90 days, for example, provides insight on whether the measurement we just looked at is higher or lower than average. It also lets us see the trend it is following, how fast it is changing, and what we can anticipate it to be in the future if no action is taken. It can be compared with a baseline set by the company or a threshold, for example. Adding this information essentially tells us whether what we are doing is working or if we need to determine where we are dropping the ball. Adding this information is the difference between “hey, 35 seconds isn’t too bad” and “we need to investigate further because it was 17 seconds last week.” This is a KPI.