How Do Performance KPIs Affect Your Strategic Impact Measurements?

Every business has to develop effective customer service strategies to maximize performance, drive improvements, and achieve ongoing success — and success starts with measuring performance KPIs.

As a manager, you should have a clear understanding of your business’s goals, values, and priorities, but building an effective strategy that takes your company’s customer service in exciting new directions is another matter altogether. It involves hard work, energy, and resources — and demands commitment from your entire team.

Without dedicating time and energy to unpacking your KPI reports and impact measurements, your strategic impact could be minimal and you may end up in a worse position than before implementing those ill-conceived changes.

You have to draw on evidence and hard data when crafting your strategy. Gather both through a well-designed quality management program, focusing on current performance KPIs of your customer service team and determining how to enhance it in the future.

How Can KPIs Be Used In Performance Management?

Your customers have certain expectations when it comes to the level of service they receive. At the very least, they assume your agents will treat them with respect, be responsive, and meet their needs. But for your business to thrive, your customer service team should be driven to go well beyond delivering the minimum experience consumers expect.

You have to aim to be the best in your sector and ensure every single interaction reinforces the customer’s loyalty to your business. And that’s where performance KPIs can make a big impact. Tracking KPIs and impact measurements can provide you with real data that identifies the positive and negative effects your agents have on customers.

Regardless of which channel a consumer uses to communicate, KPI reports are important for evaluating customer experience. Emails, chat, SMS, and phone interactions are equally important to your customer experience strategy.

Why? A survey by Salesforce reveals 76% of consumers expect a consistent experience across all channels offered by a brand. Implementing a quality management program to evaluate performance KPIs and measure customer experience is vital to creating the most relevant, effective strategies across all channels,

How Do KPIs Measure Performance?

A KPI dashboard is designed to help you gain real insights into both your team’s performance and your customers’ experience. This will be extremely helpful when planning anything from future marketing to hiring decisions.

Certain performance KPIs can be more important than others in a successful QM program. You have to consider aspects of an interaction that affect the customer’s satisfaction. What matters most to your customers? The answers to that question can help as you track KPIs.

For example, Average Response Time tells you how long consumers contacting your business can expect to wait. A 2021 HubSpot survey found 57% of respondents said long waits on hold were the most annoying part of dealing with customer service — and understandably so.

Anyone who’s ever felt their rage building as they listened to that same “your call is important to us” message on repeat understands. It’s a universal irritant every business should avoid.

It applies to all channels too, not just phone calls — your email, live chat, SMS, and social media customer service should all offer consumers a fast response. It’s basic human nature: We all want to be acknowledged and treated with respect.

In this case, if your KPI reports and impact measurements noted that your Average Response Time is poor and corresponded with low customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores or abandonments, you would recognize the need for a new strategy to ensure support requests were addressed as soon as possible. Possible solutions include increasing staffing during peak time frames, creating more self-service options to help customers problem-solve independently, and more.

Understanding The Performance KPIs That Matter

Some key performance KPIs to focus on in your quality management program are:

Your NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend your business to others or if they’re at risk of becoming a detractor. Review any KPI reports that show a poor NPS to identify what caused the poor score and implement a strategy to eliminate the problem in the future.

These performance KPIs give your company leadership and your agents the insights necessary for planning strategies to make a significant impact.

Shining A Light On Problems And Adapting To Performance KPI Changes

Tracking performance KPIs and impact measurements will reveal the common problems affecting your employees’ work and your customers’ experience. And, by developing strategies to tackle all these, you’ll be able to drive your agents to improve their quality of service over time.

However, it’s important to ensure all workers receive the coaching and support they need to adapt to changes. Remember: your company is made up of individuals, and some find learning new procedures harder than others. You can’t expect everyone to transform overnight, so keep that in mind when reviewing performance KPI reports.

Allow for growth time and adaptation in your strategies. Give employees the leeway to integrate new processes and techniques into their routines at a comfortable pace. You’ll still have to set targets, but be generous when establishing dates.

Measuring performance KPIs will be an ongoing process. You must be able to add new performance KPIs or return to older ones if your QA program seems to be losing its impact.

Developing strategies to improve your performance KPIs will improve your customer service, boost productivity, and enhance the overall experience your customers receive. Be sure to continually gather data from KPI reports and impact measurements from across all aspects of your customer service team’s work and base your strategies on the insights you gain. Don’t try to guess what will work or what your customers expect — measuring performance KPIs will give you the data and answers you need.

Unsure where to start when it comes to performance KPI impact measurements? Request a demo from Playvox to get started.