Defining the Most Effective KPIs to Measure Your Business’s Performance

Measuring your business’s performance is an ideal way to determine how well your team’s working and what you can do to deliver customer service you’re truly proud of.

After all, customer satisfaction is a key brand differentiator. Your reputation matters!

Performance measurement begins with defining your KPIs. The performance KPIs need to be the right ones to suit your business, or you risk wasting everyone’s valuable time and resources. And when you define what matters most, you can start measuring and tracking progress.

What Is Performance Measurement?

Performance measurement helps businesses identify whether their services are leading to desired results. By measuring business performance, program managers can learn how to efficiently and effectively allocate resources. Although performance measurement and customer service are hardly new to contact centers, they are used now more than ever because of demands for greater accountability and growing expectations.

Why Is Performance Measurement Important To The Success Of Businesses?

Performance measurement is crucial to providing exceptional customer service and increasing customer loyalty. Measuring business performance can also provide clues to problems that lead to solutions and improve future outcomes.

There are certain factors to consider when deciding your business performance KPIs. Let’s take a look at these, and how you can make the most of your metrics to maximize customer satisfaction.

Matching KPIs To Your Business

No two companies are identical. Even if they sell the same products, have a similar mission, and hire from the same talent pool, each business is its own entity. And this individuality must be kept in mind when defining your KPIs and measuring business performance to ensure they’re suited to your brand.

One factor to consider is your overall goals and objectives. This is paramount to any successful KPI formula. What matters most to your company? What are you trying to achieve every single day? You want to leave consumers satisfied, but there’s much more to it than that.

Do you want your customers to feel as if your business will do whatever it takes to secure their loyalty, even if it means bending terms and conditions? Do you want agents to build a strong rapport with each customer and make sure they deal with the same employee whenever they get in touch?

These are just a couple of ideas, but they demonstrate how deeply you should think about your objectives and goals when determining metrics.

Your team sizes will affect your KPIs and business performance too. For example, if you run a business in a small niche and have a small group of customer service agents, measuring the average backlog or time spent waiting on hold may not be so important. But for larger enterprises, with a larger fleet of agents, those may be very meaningful KPIs.

You have to understand what drives your business, what makes you stand out from your competition, and how you would like customers to perceive your brand when measuring business performance.

If you don’t take the time to match your KPIs to your business performance this way, you could miss major mistakes or areas demanding improvement.

Combining Related KPIs To Create Insightful Reports

Now we’ve discussed the significance of selecting KPIs suited to your business, let’s think about the importance of combining KPIs to create business performance reports.

Reporting is a crucial component of a successful quality management program. Your QM analysts spend hours each day evaluating interactions, gathering data on business performance, and coming up with strategies to keep improving agents’ work. They need to communicate their findings with agents, team leaders, and managers to plan the best, most effective ways to achieve goals.

Reports allow QM analysts to present performance-related information in a readily accessible, user-friendly format. Performance management teams will be able to compare the business’s performance with its objectives, and determine what’s gone wrong (if anything) and how it can be fixed. Hey, we need to know where we are before we can decide where we’re heading, right?

Metrics can be combined to create insightful reports on various aspects of business performance. For example, Active Waiting Calls, Sales Per Agent, and Average Handling Time could all feature in a report on agent productivity. Management, team leaders, and agents would access this from their QM software’s dashboard to view an instant breakdown of key issues.

On a similar note, Cost Per Call, Cost Per Contact, and Sales Per Agent could be combined for a report on expense versus revenue. And Call Abandonment, Customer Satisfaction, and Response Rate would also make an impactful report narrative. You have plenty of options for combining KPIs relating to specific areas of your business performance.

Changing Your Choice Of KPIs

Your business doesn’t have to stick to the same KPIs permanently. It’s perfectly fine to think about changing those you use to measure performance according to altered priorities or circumstances. As your business evolves, the metrics you use to measure business performance can too.

Adapting to data is an important aspect of a good quality management program. If you find customers left on hold over a certain period of time tend to leave low satisfaction rates, you have to make changes to reduce hold times and boost those CSAT scores. 

Perhaps you find your Average Handling Time has never fluctuated and remains at an optimal level for years, and only drops as you hire more agents. In this case, you may find you want to leave this from your business performance evaluations for a month or so to focus on a different KPI in its place instead.

Your objectives and goals may fluctuate as your business evolves. Your KPIs must always align with these for maximum impact. Otherwise, you could be channeling your QM analysts’ energy in the wrong direction.

The Importance Of Visibility With KPIs

Everyone in your organization should have access to data that relates to performance. Quality analysts and managers shouldn’t be the only people who know what type of experience customers are having, what mistakes are being made, and what strategies are in place to improve it.

The best QM software gives all employees clear visibility on all important data via their dashboard, offering access to reports, scores, progress, and more. This helps to cultivate a quality-focused culture and keep staff engaged. The program will be transparent, without any concerns of secrecy.

All KPIs should be aggregated and centralized in a well-designed dashboard, for simple, convenient access. Agents, team leaders, managers, and QM analysts should all be able to communicate, collaborate on ideas to improve performance, and understand where they stand at any time through their custom dashboard. 

Defining the most effective KPIs to measure your business’s performance may take some time, but it’s well worth the effort to ensure you avoid mistakes or oversights. Your customers have certain expectations and you must know those well enough to make sure they’re met in every interaction. Performance measurement with the right KPIs can help that happen.

Looking for stellar QM software or more information on measuring business performance? Request a demo with Playvox.