What are effective Workforce Planning Metrics?
As communication channels between companies and clients expand, the amount of data generated increases exponentially rather than linearly. This can lead to "metrics creep," where businesses continuously add metrics to focus on. Eventually, it becomes challenging to track them all and difficult to improve one metric without compromising another. In this discussion, I will specifically focus on core servicing contact center metrics, while future articles will address revenue-generating contact center metrics.
There are two categories of metrics to track: 1) Outcome and 2) Driver. In summary, driver metrics are influenced directly by the business, while outcome metrics result from the driver metrics.
Outcome Metrics:
- Service Level (SL)
- Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
- Abandoned Rate
- First Response Time
- Total Response Time
These metrics are interrelated and reflect the effectiveness of response time to customer inquiries.
Driver Metrics:
- Volume: Number of interactions handled by the contact center
- Average Handle Time: Duration of each interaction
- Shrinkage: Percentage of paid worker time not spent on resolving interactions (e.g., vacation, absenteeism, breaks/lunches, meetings)
I delve into more detail on these metrics in another article I wrote.
The correlation table below illustrates the relationships between driver and outcome metrics:
Conclusion
While there are additional core driver metrics that can be tracked in a servicing contact center, my experience suggests that other metrics are closely associated with or subsets of the core metrics discussed above. It is important to consider other metrics as well, but constant discussion of the driver metrics mentioned is crucial for all servicing contact centers. Similarly, there are different outcome metrics that can be tracked, but in a servicing environment, the core metrics that should be prioritized are optimizing operating expenses while delivering industry-standard response times to clients.