Where Contact Center Operations Break Down

People rarely go to school to learn Contact Center operations. Most people learn it on the job.

That kind of gap in industry know-how can create challenges. In this article I cover five of the most common operational challenges we encounter in our global training work.

This article is part of our Contact Center Management Series — a collection of articles that bring together practical guidance and insights to help Contact Centers run better and deliver stronger results.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain

Whenever I teach any training course, I begin by asking participants what they want to learn.

The answers give me a sense of their personal goals for attending the session.

For our course on Contact Center Management Fundamentals, something interesting occurs.

At the end of the course, when people share what they loved learning the most, those aha moments never resemble what they asked for at the beginning of the course.

Which means two things happen:

• people learn things they didn’t know 
• people learn things that they thought they knew but have now reconsidered

Managing a Contact Center, like marketing, engineering, or my own background in finance, is a business discipline.

And yet, unlike most business disciplines, it seems acceptable to learn Contact Center management almost entirely on the job, or consider years of experience to be a viable substitute for formal know-how.

Where Contact Center Operations Break Down

Contact Centers are complex — but learnable — ecosystems, with unique dynamics and mathematical realities underlying everything we do.

Any decision we make in the Center ripples across the ecosystem. That’s why it’s so important to understand operations.

So that we can anticipate the impact of our decisions across stakeholders — and thus make better decisions in line with our goals.

In the following section, I describe five common barriers I’ve observed over 25 years of teaching Contact Center operations around the world.

Barrier 1 — Setting Performance Metrics for Agents

If I were allowed only one question to assess whether Contact Center leadership understands operations, it would be this:

Tell me — in just a few brief sentences — what metrics we should use to guide Agent behavior and measure Agent performance.

Earlier this year in a course, a Contact Center leader said that Number of Calls Handled was an important productivity metric for their Center.

But that metric is simply incorrect.

Mathematically, an Agent is not primarily in control of how many calls they handle.

Leaders who have mastered their operations understand this and can articulate the rationale.

Others will believe it is true — even when it isn’t. (Thanks, Mark Twain.)

The amount of damage done to customers, employees and the organization by pursuing that incorrect metric is nearly incalcuable.

In particular, for me, that focus has held back the development of communication quality in thousands of frontline professionals over the years.

Because when an agent is confronted with hitting 80 calls per day, versus learning how to have a great conversations, quantity nearly always wins.

When I teach operations, I remind people that they want to be able to use the word “and” here.

Dan, let me tell you how we achieve both productivity and quality. Because we know our Agents shouldn’t be put in a position of having to balance them — when the reality is that well-designed operations allow us to achieve both.

That’s what an operations pro sounds like.

Barrier 2 — Confusing Drivers with Outcomes

When I hear people talk about Average Speed of Answer (ASA), I often ask a simple question:

“Why are we discussing ASA? Don’t you already have access to your Service Level performance?”

Because ASA is an outcome of Service Level.

When Service Level — the driver — goes up or down, ASA — the outcome — will move as well. In fact, it moves in the opposite direction.

With that understanding, the real question becomes:

“Shouldn’t we be diagnosing Service Level — which is the driver — and addressing the root causes behind what is happening there — rather than spending time chasing the outcome?”

A similar conversation can be had around Occupancy.

Occupancy is largely an outcome of two operational realities: the Service Level performance at any given point in time and the number of Agents actually signed into the queue at that same moment (which relates to the Pooling Principle).

Understanding your Occupancy rate matters, especially for understanding the Agent work experience.

But it is important to recognize that it is primarily an outcome metric, not a driver.

When leaders try to manage outcome metrics directly, they end up treating symptoms instead of causes.

On the other hand, when they work on diagnosing the drivers, they save time, effort, and unnecessary confusion.

When I ask people why they continue monitoring certain outcome metrics in isolation, the most common answer is:

“That’s just the way we’ve always done it.”

That answer alone should raise some red flags.

Barrier 3 — Treating Service Level & Quality as a Trade-Off

This is another one of those defining points that separate people who understand their operations from those who don’t — at least not yet.

It’s the mistaken belief that in order to improve quality, you’ll have to sacrifice on how many calls you handle.

And conversely, in order to ‘improve’ (which in this context means increase) how many calls you handle, you’ll have to sacrifice on quality.

It’s a textbook example of short-term thinking.

If, between 1PM and 4PM on a particularly busy Tuesday afternoon, you ask everyone to handle more calls, quality will inevitably suffer.

Everything from pushing Customers to self-service to hanging up on them mid-sentence. These behaviors are real.

But what about the mid- and longer-term consequences?

Some number of those Customers will need to reach out to you again, often choosing multiple methods such as sending you an email, starting a chat, and calling again — even at the same time.

As a result, the overall workload now includes three new unnecessary contacts — simply because we decided to rush through the first contact.

There is no balance between Service Level and Quality. You don’t ever approach these two vital goals — which sit together at the heart of operations — by pitting them against each other.

They move together.

Over time, when Service Level performance improves, Quality does too. Because the pace of work (Occupancy) for Agents stabilizes.

And over time, when Quality improves, that contributes positively to Service Level performance, through reduction of unnecessary repeat contacts.

There’s an art to operations management — and leadership overall — in understanding time horizons.

It requires considering what will happen in the short term, the mid-term, and the long term.

Because the consequences of decisions keep unfolding — whether we planned for them or not.

Barrier 4 — Not Understanding How KPIs Interact

Because there are so many KPIs in contact center operations, it helps to teach them in categories.

We use QAECS system:

• Quality (the relevant quality KPIs go into this category)
• Accessibility ( the relevant accessibility KPIs go into this category and so on)
• Efficiency
• Cost
• Strategic

For example, the KPIs of Occupancy, Adherence to Schedule, and Average Handling Time all belong to the efficiency category. While First Contact Resolution goes best in the quality category.

As we work through each individual KPI we answer these questions:

• What does this KPI specifically measure?
• Why was this KPI selected?
• What are the factors to be aware of when you use this KPI?
• In what way does this KPI serve stakeholders?

That matters because it is important to first understand each KPI individually.

Then we get to the meaningful and fun part — understanding how each KPI interacts with the others.