Barriers to Benchmarking: How One Company Solved the Problem

By Natalie Romano

A major stumbling block that companies face in preparing a benchmarking analysis is obtaining reliable statistics on their own contact-center operations. Often the information must be assembled from disparate systems. Even when the statistics can be gathered, it may be difficult to align them with industry-wide measures to perform apples-to-apples comparisons.

Companies often make the mistake of measuring for the sake of measurement, and in the process they calibrate everything. As many as 150 metrics can be measured in a contact center. Too many metrics can make it difficult, if not impossible, to develop meaningful conclusions from the mountain of data you collect. As an alternative, consider identifying 10 key performance indicators. Tie those indicators back to your strategy, operations, people, processes and technology to improve competitiveness, customer service and efficiency.

A common pitfall in benchmarking is the belief that the performance indicator itself is the goal. If the company you’re benchmarking against achieves a low abandoned call rate or high customer satisfaction, that measure may become the goal regardless of what dysfunctional or inefficient processes may underpin it.

In contrast, successful benchmarking will seek to understand the circumstances in which processes work well, rather than just their end results. For example, if a contact center is handling insurance claims, it doesn’t make sense to set a target talk time of less than a minute.

In Southern California, a waste management company added 14,000 customers virtually overnight and the company’s contact center began experiencing significantly higher call volume. The company believed it could use existing call-center technology more effectively and improve several key performance indicators, such as abandon rate and average speed of answer.

The company had a benchmarking and performance audit conducted on its existing contact center infrastructure and services. The resulting report addressed effective management practices, operational and technology changes focused on customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, and industry-leading performance objectives and results for comparable service industry contact centers.

After implementing the recommended changes, the waste management company achieved significant improvements, including:

• The average speed of answer rate was cut by 9 seconds per call.
• Customer satisfaction ratings improved by 14 percent.
• Abandon rates declined by 16 percent.

The qualitative context, not the quantitative results, will lead to a more meaningful benchmarking effort.

Making good use of the benchmarking results is the next major challenge. Appropriate, insightful interpretation of the results is essential to identifying which shortcomings present the most promising improvement opportunities.  Once you’ve identified the opportunities, the real work of putting them into action begins.

I can’t emphasize this enough: Benchmarking alone doesn’t improve performance. You have to take action based on the benchmarking results. It’s critical to understand where inefficiencies and performance gaps are occurring within your organization and then identify and implement changes to address the poor performance. And always keep unintended consequences in mind — a change to improve performance in one area can affect other areas.

Implementing a benchmarking program and acting on its results will help equip your organization to improve continuously. Focus on developing a strategy to implement leading practices and making the process changes needed to drive improved performance.

Natalie Romano is a managing director at Avaya, Inc . She leads the Avaya Professional Services Strategic Communications Consulting team, which focuses on business, operational, and technology issues associated with customer contact centers and enterprise unified communications.