Transforming Contact Centers with Data-Driven Metrics

AN EVOLUTION
IN MEASUREMENT
Transforming Contact
& Support Center
Metrics
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AN EVOLUTION
IN MEASUREMENT
Transforming Contact & Support
Center Metrics
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2013 OKAS Consulting
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
4 INTRODUCTION
6 THE CALL CENTER TODAY
6 The Voice of the Customer
7 When the Wheels Come Off – Customer & Internal Dissatisfaction
9 The Traditional 80/20 Rule
12 Missing Data is a Missed Customer Opportunity
14 Agent Churn Impacts Customer Satisfaction
18 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (CXBI™)
18 The Value & Impact of Knowledge Sharing
20 Connecting the Dots – with Data
21 Data Driven Business Decisions in a Customer Centric Culture
22 You’d Never Know the Data Wasn’t “Integrated”
25 NO MORE TIERS! THE CONTACT CENTER OF THE FUTURE
25 Self Service Through Conversations
25 Community
26 Organizational Shift
27 The Road to Change – Reorganization, Gamification, Social Engagement
29 Changing Roles
33 DISCOVER HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CALL CENTER EXPERIENCE
34 ABOUT
35 RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

INTRODUCTION
Today, most organizations capture only a fraction of the data required to
make business decisions. Sometimes, even when the data exists, inter-
section points have not been defined or identified from an organizational
perspective nor have they been leveraged to communicate the impact of
decisions on the overall health of the company.
OKAS Consulting understands the value of making fact-based organiza-
tional decisions for corporate and product strategy, investment, organiza-
tional change and overall customer care. The experts at OKAS Consulting
architected the Customer Experience Business Intelligence™ (CXBI) me-
thodology to guide enterprise-class organizations with call, customer care,
customer support and technical support centers through the key steps re-
quired to capture the right data, monitor key metrics and make integrated,
data-driven, fact-based decisions across the organization.
Call statistics and vanity metrics don’t provide
enough insight to make positive, impactful de-
cisions nor do they help to define tactical strate-
gies or make long-term investment decisions for
an organization. Using the CXBI methodology,
organizations will improve their customer support,
reduce costs, increase customer and employee
loyalty, and make informed strategic investment
and organizational decisions.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a strategy designed to effectively
manage organizational and technological change to improve the overall
health of business operations. Using a knowledge-centric approach, rea-
ders will come away with practical tips and advice to break down islands of
information and garner a holistic view of the business. This whitepaper will
walk you through the effective data identification and collection process,
All content Copyright©
www.okas-consulting.com
4

using mashups and graphical presentations, all with a goal of empowe-
ring each business unit, allowing them to become more aware of business
events as they happen, tackling challenges, and gaining an unprecedented
view into operational status and impacts to enable better decisions.
CXBI is the strategy, implementation and methodology for a well-managed,
phased approach to improving organizational effectiveness through the ef-
fective correlation of events across multiple tools and systems. The result
is a complete understanding of the total customer experience.
5

THE CALL CENTER OF TODAY
Many traditional call centers rely on a tiered system to address customer enquiries
and issues. The initial touch point could be a web-based content system, interactive
voice response to route the call appropriately or direct 1:1 interaction with a first line
representative. The majority of calls are closed at ‘level one’ with an average of 20%
of calls being escalated to the next tier in the support organization.
The Voice of the Customer
In many cases the customer is their only advocate and the only one representing their
needs and voice. Typically customers believe they are up against a very well defined
structure of policies, procedures and organizational boundaries.
This presents a huge barrier and can make it challenging for any customer to
do business effectively with the organization.
6

The company structures every interaction based on a defined process that is de-
signed to arrive at a solution or resolution on the company’s terms.
There is no customer advocate within the “system,” and all interactions are governed
and presented in the voice of the company providing the service.
When the Wheels Come Off –
Customer & Internal Dissatisfaction
The call center has 200 front line agents taking calls from customers requi-
ring assistance. Agents are pressured to obtain first call resolution. Front
line agents are not empowered nor trained to provide customers with all of
the answers they seek and have very little decision-making authority. Inter-
nally, the call center culture frowns upon escalating issues to second or third
line support. Peer and management pressure to solve problems quickly to
improve statistics are the goal rather than customer satisfaction and long-
term retention and loyalty.
From the customer point of view, it can be their worst nightmare to have
to call into the call center and speak to a front-line call center agent. Cus-
tomers are more technically savvy and educated than ever. More often than
not, customers are able to match if not exceed the knowledge and skills of
any front-line agent. They brace themselves for the conversation where
they must explain their situation in great detail and perform tasks that in all
likelihood, they have already attempted to resolve their issue. The customer
is frustrated because they believe their time is not being respected and even
wasted. Call center resources are duplicating efforts with issues that either
could be solved through other self-service tools or by immediately escalating
to an expert who can solve their issue quickly.
7

The immediate result of this traditional call scenario is:
• Rushed resolutions
• Duplication of efforts
• Lack of attention to detail
• Impressive call stats that do not reflect the facts or reality
• Inconsistent support
• Unsatisfied customers
The long-term result is:
• Lost revenue
• Lost customers
• Customer churn
“Customers of major companies with call centers are more likely
to lose their customers to their competitors based on a perceived
poor experience from the customer rather than quality or pricing
of products or services. In this case, the company may or may
not even be aware the customer has been lost, let alone be able
to earn back their business. The solution is to provide a superior
customer experience as the customer sees it versus gauging per-
formance exclusively on call statistics. This requires ease of ac-
cess to information and solutions to problems, superior customer
interactions, and accessible, knowledge centric delivery channels.”
Jennifer Macintosh, CEO & Founder,
OKAS Consulting
The traditional customer care center tracks metrics such as:
• Call volume
• Call duration
• Dropped calls
• First Contact Resolution
• Customer Satisfaction
• Employee satisfaction
• Cost Per Call
• Percentage of Escalations
8

The Traditional 80/20 Rule
Each call center has a managed escalation path in order to triage and escalate, or
close a customer call. The breakdown of escalations in the average call center is 80%
of calls closed on first contact at level 1 with 20% of calls being escalated to the next
level of support. Simple issues are resolved on the spot with the first level of support
providing solutions for known issues. If an issue is unknown the first level support will
escalate to the next tier for resolution.
Figure 1 Traditional Transactional Call Center Data. AHT & ASA come from the phone system.
The Customer Satisfaction Data came from a survey. There is no correlation between the data
offering no additional business insight.
9

In this scenario, with the measures currently being tracked, the call center will appear
to be effective and operating within acceptable standards. Minimal call drops, closing
majority of calls on first touch point, escalating a small percentage of calls to second
or third level support and ultimately resolving a situation are all important statistics to
measure in any call center.
Unfortunately, it is not enough. This limited level of monitoring and measurement is
actually is generating a false positive as it is only a fraction of the data an organization
needs to provide superior customer experience, informed fact-based business deci-
sions, strategic vision and direction for the company.
“When a customer has a poor service experience it cannot be recovered in
a single event. The impact of one bad customer experience erases the be-
nefits of multiple positive experiences. Regaining the customer’s trust and
confidence will take multiple, positive interactions. In any relationship it takes
months to build trust and confidence and seconds to lose it. On a larger
scale, it is widely known and documented that retaining existing customers is
far cheaper than acquiring new customers. The same dynamic is true at the
interaction level. Recovering from a poor customer experience is more cost-
ly than investing in creating consistent and positive customer experiences.”
- Greg Oxton, Executive Director,
Consortium for Service Innovation
10

The Siloed Data Support Model
Knowledge exists in every organization within the walls of the company and can
be obtained from existing people and technology-based resources. Too often, the
knowledge itself is not being leveraged to provide the best and most efficient customer
support and value across the organization. When leveraged, this existing knowledge
can empower front-line, customer-facing professionals to provide solutions to known
problems quickly and ultimately turn into a valuable self-service knowledge base.
The average cost of a support interaction is $44.00 with the highest channel cost
being phone-based support and lowest, email-based support. It would be logical
to invest in providing a higher quality of support using more cost-effective channels
including creating a knowledge base of information, including frequently asked ques-
tions, known issues and news. The knowledge base would not only be a central point
of information but it could also provide insight into customer behaviour.
11

The Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS
SM
) methodology offers profound benefits
for any information-intensive service or support organization.
KCS will help organizations:
• Solve Cases and Incidents Faster
o 50–60% improved time to resolution
o 30–50% increase in first contact resolution (FCR)
• Optimize Use of Resources
o 70% improved time to proficiency
o 20–35% improved employee retention
o 20–40% improvement in employee satisfaction
• Enable Self-Service Strategy
o Improve customer success and use of web self-help
o Up to 50% case deflection
• Build Organizational Learning
o Actionable information to product development about customer
issues 
o Equipped with these concepts and measurements that explain
the support organization’s impact on the broader business.
Missing Data is a Missed Customer Opportu-
nity
Clark Wayne, a customer, has had his issue is escalated to second-level
support. He is relieved to be able to speak to an expert who has the skills
to solve their problem. Frank, the second level agent, identifies the source
of the problem quickly and proposes a solution. Clark accepts the solution,
thanks Frank and ends the call believing he has received great support.
Frank jots down some cryptic notes in the system, closes the call, picks up
the next one that has been assigned to him as soon as possible and begins
work on the next issue.
12

The next day, John Baker, another customer, calls with the same problem.
The scenario repeats itself and John works his way through first level sup-
port, gets the issue escalated, and reaches a different second-level agent,
Scott who spends a significant amount of time attempting to solve the same
problem. Scott is unaware there is a simple solution, and the information
is available from Frank who took a similar call yesterday, sitting only two
cubicles over, Scott spends hours on the issue, eventually solving it. John
accepts the solution but is now weary and frustrated by the length of time
it took to solve the problem. John is, however, satisfied the issue is finally
resolved. Scott records every single detail he can remember in the system
but is pressured to take the next call in the queue. He finishes up rapidly,
missing a few important details and closes the call in order to take on ano-
ther escalation.
Figure 2 Escalations cost organizations millions every year.
Customer satisfaction would increase while support costs would
be significantly reduced. if agents at each level of escalation
shared their knowledge.
13

Agent Churn Impacts Customer
Satisfaction
Frank has been a second-level agent for 5 years and providing support for
over a decade. He’s ready to move on to new challenges but really en-
joys a certain “hero” status and reputation he has earned in the support
organization. He is excellent at what he does and has developed strategic
connections with both customers and members of the field that enable him
to do more than the traditional second-level support agent. Frank travels
the world to high-profile client sites for strategic meetings to save deals, or to
troubleshoot and solve problems. He attends user conferences because the
clients want to meet the person who has provided them with great support
over the years. Frank is also in demand by the products team because he
understands the products inside and out from both a technical and business
user perspective. He has never been one to share too much at the risk of
losing his status and diminishing his value to the organization. In his role,
Frank is considered a rock star and enjoys rock star treatment.
He’s been offered two lucrative job opportunities. An internal role he is consi-
dering is with the products team that has product ownership and high visi-
bility within the organization. The other role is with a high profile customer
being the resident expert in the company. In either scenario, when Frank
leaves the support organization he will take all of his knowledge with him.
That knowledge will either stay with the company with a products focus or it
will be lost if Frank takes the job with the customer. In both cases, the sup-
port team loses because Frank’s knowledge because he has not shared it,
beyond cryptic points in customer call notes.
Traditionally, customer-facing support professionals are not empowered to create
customer-facing documents. It is incongruent to suggest that the same employees
who are trusted to provide solutions to customers on the phone should not be the
ones creating shareable resources that will be leveraged by their co-workers and by
customers directly. The role of the customer support professional in a knowledge-
centric center is more a concierge than an agent, a connector rather than a closer or
escalator.
14

Granted, not all customer-facing employees are writers, but they are solution provi-
ders. Not only do they provide solutions but they also understand how to commu-
nicate in a way the customer understands, not in the voice of a technical manual
or ‘market speak.’ Customer-facing employees need to know how to speak in the
customer’s voice. It is in this voice that contact center staff can be empowered to
create and update articles, tips, solutions, how to’s and known issue documents for
customers and fellow employees across the organization. These documents need to
be accessible, on demand and a trusted source of truth.
Light training must be provided to key contact center professionals to ensure there
is a standard format for these knowledge-sharing documents, and most importantly,
standards in support of document quality and accuracy. The task of training is not
onerous, nor is it costly. This all-important exercise will represent a significant change
in the support model being used at contact centers worldwide.
To seize the opportunity, the progressive contact center closes the data gaps by provi-
ding a robust, contact center-owned and managed knowledge base for use internally
and externally as the first tier, self-service support system. Convenient, timely and
accurate information would be available to the customer, partner, contact center pro-
fessional or internal employees in a timely and easy-to-access manner.
There is much more to measuring success than simply deploying a solution or launching
new technology. Meaningful metrics generate meaningful business decisions. Once
self-service and self-help is readily available across this progressive organization,
what should this organization be measuring as a next step in the knowledge-centric
contact center?
The focus of measurement shifts now to include measures from the self-service cus-
tomer experience. Organizations can gain insight into product quality, what issues
are costing the company the most money and how quickly are customers getting the
information they require.
Measure of success – known issues are documented
and the article made available to customers online
within 24 hours.
15

Measures such as:
• % of interactions by path (assisted,
self-help or community)
• % of customers who use of web first
• % of customer success on the web
• % of customer success in the com-
munity
• % of new vs known issues in as-
sisted service.
• Time to solve known issues
• Time to solve new issues
• Time to publish knowledge base ar-
ticles
All of these measures are based on understanding how the customer is using the
system, what information is being leveraged, how much time it takes to solve known
and new problems, and the amount of time it takes to publish an article to a known
problem.
Some traditional web metrics may actually indicate there is a problem. The time
spent on the online site usually indicates how ‘sticky’ or compelling that websites’
content is. Now it’s a great example of a potential problem for the knowledge base.
Long durations can now indicate that the user has been on the site for a very long
time, not being able to locate what they are looking for. Conversely, a short duration
visit could indicate a user has immediately given up trying to locate an answer.
It is important for organizations to be aware that positioning a self-service knowledge
base can be perceived by the customer as another potential barrier between them
and speaking to a knowledgeable human being. This option needs to be positioned
carefully as a valuable, accurate repository that can be accessed at the customer’s
convenience, day or night, allowing them to quickly solve problems in a fraction of
the time spent waiting on the phone. The ultimate goal of providing this critical option
makes doing business with the company easier and more convenient to the customer.
Rather than a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, you need to launch this option to
your customers with and effective marketing campaign, ensuring they understand the
value of the system.
16

Now that knowledge is available on demand, there are new measures and statistics
to track that would be of greatest value and interest across the organization. The
challenge that most organizations face in this phase is that the data is siloed across
many different and disparate databases and systems. Aggregating data is challen-
ging, and identifying trends requires a significant amount of manual labor in each
reporting period to understand root cause and business impact.
Two approaches for data support most often emerge when there is a move to cen-
tralize data. Often the IT team is given sole responsibility for the data manipulation,
leaving the business with a limited ability to develop or massage data themselves to
ascertain the business drivers or impact. On the other hand, many support centers
generate a team of individuals within the support organization to become the reporting
or business intelligence team. While these individuals have tremendous knowledge of
their company’s products and processes, this business intelligence team often lacks
skills in data modeling, knowledge of best governance practices, and have limited
business information architecture experience.
The contact center is no longer about only taking calls and call statistics. It is at the
front lines of the customer experience. It is the key interface between the business
and its customer. The contact center can generate deep business insight internally.
It is responsible for the dissemination of the knowledge to stakeholders, including
customers and partners. It also has the potential to integrate that data to present a
holistic view of the business to both its internal management team and executives. It
can provide the entire organization with the ability to make fact-based business and
strategic decisions.
17

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (CXBI
TM
)
The Value & Impact of Knowledge Sharing
By evolving the contact center to a more knowledge-driven, customer-centric organi-
zation with robust sharing of information with both the customer and internal stakehol-
ders, the new organization becomes a means to provide the business with unique
and strategic business insights. By tracking the metrics that matter in this progressive
contact center, stakeholders will be able to closely track what is happening with their
customers and better manage the overall business.
The Customer Experience Business Intelligence (CXBI) approach to support is de-
signed to ease the data, organizational and financial burdens of a company that is
looking to improve their overall Customer Experience. Using the CXBI methodology,
organizations will discover the direct correlation of customer experiences to business
performance, and be empowered to make data-driven decisions to improve the ove-
rall customer experience.
The traditional route of sourcing and evaluating Business Intelligence (BI) reporting
tools, getting on the IT project calendar, centralizing and modeling data and then desi-
gning reports and dashboards for all business units is an onerous process. For many
organizations it can also be a costly endeavour. With many companies adopting agile
methodologies for their internal business processes, it is no longer an option to wait
up to 3 years to get the data required to make strategic business decisions.
CXBI offers a flexible, cost-effective approach for business users to get access to
the data require quickly with little to no reliance on IT to create, deploy and manage
an environment or build reports and dashboards. By placing data securely in the
cloud and using a business-driven iterative approach to design, develop and deploy,
stakeholders will see value in weeks rather than months or years.
It is no longer an option to wait up to 3 years to
get the data required to make strategic business
decisions.
18

Traditionally, companies would invest in a Business Intelligence tool to Extract Trans-
fer and Load (ETL) the data into multiple systems. With CXBI, data integration is built
right into the process to support data aggregation and mashups from multiple data
sources. This means there is no need to invest in yet another data tool, which usually
comes with a hefty price tag.
Customer contact centers are the hub of activity and insight for any organization.
Traditional BI reporting or at the opposite end of the spectrum, using spreadsheets
to gain valuable insights and correlate metrics with customer behaviors is simply not
enough. CXBI provides the methodology and tools to quickly get the insight required
and shared and meaningful understanding of the data to make data driven business
decisions.
Figure 3 With a CXBI Executive Dashboard , leaders can immediately
view the center performance at a glance with the ability to drill down to
more detail for greater understanding and insight. They have the ability
to see both leading indicators (activities) and lagging indicators (outco-
mes) for a holistic and comprehensive view of performance.
19

“The value of the knowledge created by customer support professionals
cannot be measured within the support organization alone. Product mana-
gement, development, marketing, communications, finance and corporate
strategy can all benefit from the information derived from trends, exceptions
and other insights into customer activity. Since the customer experience is
the key driver in customer loyalty, organizations must fully capitalize on and
leverage the talent they employ and the data at their disposal.”
Jennifer Macintosh, CEO & Founder,
OKAS Consulting
Connecting the Dots – with Data
The biggest challenge with connecting and presenting data is not actually technical,
but rather knowing what questions to answer. Once an organization knows more
about what data is available and can be captured, they can identify the business
questions they need answered.
20

Data Driven Business Decisions in a Cus-
tomer Centric Culture
Jim, the VP of Support, is used to seeing financial reports about the num-
ber of cases in his support center in relationship to the number of staff, and
calculating a cost-per-support case among other key metrics to allow him
to access support performance. He monitors these reports religiously for
trends and exceptions.
It wasn’t until they decided to up their metrics game by looking at the volume
of cases by channel (phone, chat, email, including self-service). With this new
information Jim was able to see the differences in the costs associated with
supporting customers on the various channels. Before this metrics tracking
had been implemented, he had always thought the infrastructure required to
provide phone support was the most expensive. On that assumption, he had
created a whole marketing campaign to support it, driving customers to use
email support. His organization had business cards, taglines, internal and
external messaging driven customers to use «email support» everywhere.
Now that Jim accurately understood the cost differences across the chan-
nels, he was keen to see correlation based on customer feedback. The team
was able to now mashup data between their financial results and their cus-
tomer satisfaction survey results. What they found was the email channel
was not only the most expensive channel, it was also the channel with the
least customer satisfaction. With newly discovered insights, Jim has asked
the team do dig deeper into the types of issues that are coming in by channel
so they can more efficiently route the right issues to the right channel.
CXBI is about data driven decision-making. The data is
driving organizational change and strategy.
21

Product Strategy – Identifying Opportunities
Product Management is planning their new product releases and scheduling
maintenance releases for the next year and a half. To assist them in their
planning, they have traditionally turned to the bug and enhancement re-
quest database. With additional insight into the types of customers calling
in bugs and enhancement requests, as well as the content being created
and accessed, product managers can take a more strategic approach.
In this case, the product manager may find there is a significant business op-
portunity with an industry vertical based on the number of incidents they are
receiving from users in that industry. The product manager determines that
something tailored to creating a specific application for that industry, such as
templates, samples or an industry-specific guide on using the product would
address the opportunity presented by that vertical.
Product Management may identify a usability issue with a feature they belie-
ved was performing well. Since there were no bugs assigned to the problem,
the issue never received any visibility. Due to the many workarounds and
‘how to’ documents to help a user achieve success faster using this feature
and the amount of times the content was viewed, a decision could be made
to improve the user experience of that part of the product.
You’d Never Know the Data Wasn’t “Inte-
grated”
As long as the data exists, it can be presented or otherwise “mashed up” to provide
unique business insight that otherwise would never be uncovered. By collecting the
data, identifying the intersection points and presenting it in a useful way, the business
can make decisions based on a holistic view of the company rather than a silo or is-
land of responsibility.
22

Data mashups eliminate the requirement of a single data repository, exclusive IT
ownership and management and limited business reporting capabilities. Business
decision-making can’t wait until the data has been combined, modeled and presented.
For additional context, business users can add events that may explain an increase or
decrease in knowledge center activity. Business events, product releases, marketing
campaigns, company announcements, conferences and other significant events that
may drive customer traffic to the knowledge center. Managers and executives need
the data in a timely manner and they need to be able to explore for additional insight
and understanding based on a business event or exception.
As a result, mashed-up data presented in a series of business dashboards with drill-
through capabilities for deeper and shared understanding of a business impact or
events are critical to the success of any organization.
23

This places the support center and its professionals in a more effective, strategic bu-
siness role in an organization beyond simply providing customer service.
Customer Success Index
The CXBI methodology uses a Customer Success Index that is made up of 4 distinct
indicators. Based on a periodic survey to customers, customers are asked to provide
a rating for their:
1. Satisfaction – how satisfied are they with the service they
receive?
2. Effort – how easy is it to do business with the organization?
3. Expectation –does the service and/product quality meet their
expectations?
4. Loyalty – how likely are they to recommend this organization to
other customers?
Bringing these four elements together creates an index of Customer Success.
Customer support can be highly profitable while increasing both customer retention
rates and improving the company’s bottom line.
Support is less about a tiered funnel and more a network connecting people with
content and people with people in a relevant way. Systems that were put in place to
facilitate bi-directional communication are now being extended to include additional
social platforms and reporting tools to create a community of care and knowledge. As
a result, new measures have been created to monitor all aspects of customer support
including:
• Community
• Self Service
• Expert Assistance
24

NO MORE TIERS! THE CONTACT
CENTER OF THE FUTURE
Self Service Through Conversations
Knowledge base articles are the beginning of providing a solid self-service infrastruc-
ture for customers to obtain solutions to their issues. A self-service experience re-
quires a strategic marketing plan, a strategy for getting customers to use the portal,
engaging content, interactive tools, effective navigation, and an accurate search.
Conversations are the next generation of support where descriptions of problems,
sharing of details and scenarios provide context in addition to the problem and solu-
tion. This context provides more value outside the center to various parts of the bu-
siness to assist with tactical and strategic planning. With this level of detail, business
units can identify opportunities, find trends and engage customers more efficiently.
Community
Engagement in a support community can take many forms ranging from the creation
and consumption of valuable content, to participation in micro communities focused
on a specific subject, to interests, products or trends. It can also be a source for conti-
nual, closed-loop education of the customer base.
Communities will become social networks connecting customers to other customers,
customers to partners and vice a versa. More importantly, the customer gets connec-
ted to the experts they require. These experts could be customers, a partner or staff
member. In this scenario having “expert” label in your community doesn’t imply that
the expert is a member of staff, nor does the expert have to be.
Gamification – Customer Engagement Can
be Fun!
Customer interaction and most importantly, customer satisfaction can be fun. It can
be fun for the organization but enjoyable for the customer as well. Gamification is the
use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems
It isn’t simply fun and games, there is a measurable impact when key business pro-
25

cess are transformed into a game, and when the attainment of key metrics are rewar-
ded. The business intelligence received from the increased commitment and interac-
tion between team members provides incredible insight into new measures including:
• Most Valuable Participants (MVP’s)
• Most Valuable Content (MVC)
• # of community resolutions (problems resolved by cus-
tomers & partners)
• Referrals from community (website hits, events, additio-
nal sales)
• And more!
Participants should be recognized for their outstanding contributions within the com-
munity. Recognition can take many forms, including graphical badges identifying
their level of contribution, reputation rating, status within the community or even pro-
filing individual participants on a regular basis to elevate their visibility and recognize
their significant commitment to the health of the community.
Organizational Shift
The organizational shift to providing a customer-centric approach to support and care
can improve organizational efficiency, improve customer loyalty through improved
customer satisfaction, increased employee retention and reduced costs. For many
organizations, this can sound like a like dream, but it can be a reality through shared
knowledge and a cross-functional understanding of customers, and centralized cus-
tomer data across the company.
Customers get the support they require, access to experts, visibility and
the ability to connect with other customers while the organization reduces or
eliminates the need for a tiered system. Every participant in the knowledge-
centric care community is a contributor and curator of content.
Staff experts providing live online or phone based 1:1 care, exclusively fo-
cus on unique situations or outliers that do not have a known resolution while
online content takes the place of the live Tier 1 agent offering solutions to
known problems or answers to frequently asked questions.
26

Development knows which areas of the product require attention based
on user interactions and feedback. Developers can then gain a deeper un-
derstanding into how product features are being used and the environments
customers are using the product in.
Product management knows what technology investments are required
immediately and in the future. They can understand the product features,
usability issues and potential need for underlying licensed technologies.
They can better prioritize maintenance patches, future product releases and
engage customers more effectively due to their deeper understanding of
customer requirements.
Product marketing can engage at a deeper and more credible level with
existing customers and prospects. They understand how their product is
being used and can leverage that information in future marketing campaigns
targeted at key customers.
Executive management will have facts to justify product investment and
budget allocations based on product performance. Management will have
deep insight into return on investment and can now provide a correlation
of key business events into support costs, product, customer adoption and
corporate strategy.
The Road to Change – Reorganization, Ga-
mification, Social Engagement
Changing responsibilities, roles, reorganization, implementing new techniques for
new business processes, using game theory or gamification’ and creating new levels
of social engagement with customers can shake the foundations of any level of mana-
gement. While some of these concepts are not new, introducing changes that require
shifts in organizational and business mindset, along with introducing an entirely new
model to elevate and optimize business interaction is certain to have some challen-
ges.
In this new model of knowledge-centric, community-based customer support, the fo-
cus is on guiding the customer to right service channel instead of engaging in high
touch, high-cost resources immediately. Providing reusable resources with the ‘write
27

Figure 4 CXBI enables a holistic view of the contact center from
Customer, Service and Employee data driven insights.
once, read many’ model and removing the barriers to experts is the future for all cus-
tomer care centers, and an integral step towards to providing value to stakeholders
externally and internally across the organization.
Analyze what is working well with the organization and determine how new concepts
introduced in this paper would enhance the customer experience, increase business
as well as delivering valuable insight for other business units.
For large contact centers, especially those who are geographically distributed and
those who have global customer base with multilingual requirements, a knowledge
centric approach is ideal to bridge the gaps in service, knowledge and create commu-
nities supporting the diverse customer communities versus segmenting and separa-
ting.
28

Changing Roles
We have examined the changing roles of both the support professionals and how the
organization can be more aware of customer-centric data. We have also explored the
changing role of the customer. In the true network of care, a customer can now be ele-
vated beyond a passive recipient of information to an active participant in product de-
velopment, problem solving and trouble-shooting. This evolution to a customer-centric
approach essentially replaces the traditional tiered approach to support.
New Metrics – A Value Based Approach
New metrics are now in place that provide a strategic look at the business overall in-
cluding:
Today’s industry average for success on the web is 50%. Adopting a shift CXBI sup-
port model, companies can expect to see this increase to as high as 75-80%.
Figure 5 Team members are measured based on the
value and quality they deliver.
29

Self Service & Community
• Total demand for Service (exceptions)
• % of issues by path (assisted, self-help or community)
• % of customers use of web first
• % customer success on the web
• % customer success in the community
• Loyalty (customer, employee, partner)
Expert Assistance
• % New vs known in assisted
• Time to solve known issues
• Time to solve new issues
• Time to publish articles
Development
• % of product improvements
• Time to cure (remove issues from the environment)
• Time to adopt a new release
Operations
• Support cost as % of revenue
• Cost/exception (system level)
Traditional measures are important to continue monitoring when adding these new
measures for the knowledge centric-contact center. In fact, those measures will be
very valuable in benchmarking and trend analysis to monitor the shift to more satisfied
customers and reduced costly resources on the front lines.
Overtime trends can be analyzed to gain additional insight including:
30

• Product quality over time
• Cost by product, by release, by functional area
• Total customer value (Revenue + Loyalty + Customer Effort)
• Employee turnover by product
• Product investment ROI by product, release, feature
• Level of community engagement by staff, partners and engage-
ments
• Community engagement by industry vertical, by product, over time,
• Value of content type based on consumption solution, how to’s,
event invites, marketing
• Gamification measures # of experts, profiles including specific cha-
racteristics, participation metrics
• Calendar based participation high volume, low volume, by month,
by geography, by support channel
• Demographic based participation language, geography, time zone
In this paper we reviewed the journey from a traditional enterprise class call center to
the contact center of the future. Transitioning to a knowledge-centric contact center
from phone-based call center improves overall customer care and satisfaction while
providing data points for all business units across the company to make data-driven
business decisions. With the ‘write once, read many’ knowledge-centric approach
Figure 6 Call center dashboard monitoring multiple aspects of the business
including Employee Health Index, Process & Operations, Customer Loyalty
Index and correlating call center performance with Strategic Corporate Ini-
tiatives.
Employee Health Index
Satisfaction
Retention & Growth
Collaboration
Process &
Operations
Case Quality
Article Quality
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Customer Loyalty Index
Satisfaction
Retention, Churn & Growth
Loyalty
Strategic Initiatives
Improving Capacity
Online Experience Satisfaction
Web Success
31

experts have a clear focus on resolutions for unsolved issues while self-service in-
teractions and communities provides on-demand service to known issues, sharing
valuable subject matter expertise and demonstrating thought leadership.
32

DISCOVER HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR
CALL CENTER EXPERIENCE
Sign up for an on-demand demonstration at
www.okas-consulting.com from the customer
experience experts, OKAS Consulting, to
discover the measures and positive impact a
knowledge-centric contact center would have
for your organization.
http://twitter.com/OKASConsulting
http://www.linkedin.com/company/okas-consulting
http://www.facebook.com/Okasconsulting
33

ABOUT
OKAS Consulting was founded in 2012 by leading industry business intelligence
and customer experience experts on the principles of Optimizing Knowledge and
Service. Architects of the Customer Experience Business IntelligenceTM
(CXBI)
methodology, OKAS demonstrates thought leadership and subject matter expertise
by supporting enterprise class organizations implementing business intelligence
solutions and programs to improve customer service, increase employee and client
loyalty and reduce costs. OKAS Consulting delivers consulting, training, program
development and implementation services to software and service providers world-
wide. Find out how OKAS can improve your customer experience, loyalty and op-
timize organizational efficiency through data driven decisions at www.okas-consul-
ting.com
34

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Consortium for Service Innovation - www.serviceinnovation.org
• KCSSM
Measurement Matters - The Benefits and Organizatio-
nal Measures of Knowledge-Centered Support
• The 8 Practices and Techniques of the KCS Methodology
Service XRG – www.servicexrg.com
• Support Operational Strategies and Benchmarks
35

Transforming Contact Centers with Data-Driven Metrics

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