Swing and a Miss — Support Center Metrics

Intense focus on speedy resolution is short-sighted

Part IX of this series of articles that share useful insights and practical guidance to troubleshoot underperforming self-help and learning systems

Organizational leaders love their dashboard metrics, and when it comes to their support center, those metrics come by the boatload: response and resolution, escalation, abandonment, average talk time, etc. In many organizations, the metrics are used to focus the team’s attention on solving each user’s problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.

From a content strategy perspective that emphasizes quality control, this myopic emphasis on getting that customer off the call ASAP is both misplaced and wasteful.

A zealous emphasis on quickly resolving the call can lead to unintended consequences. For example, time-to-resolution metrics reward a support team for speedily solving the needs of ten customers — each of whom had the same problem — while leaving the problem’s cause untreated for hundreds more. Moreover, speed criteria often leads to risky corner cutting and undesirable behavior, e.g. support personnel saving downloads locally for quicker access, distracted attention, interrupting and jumping to conclusions.

Support center personnel are often characterized by their colleagues as being the tip of the spear because they represent the organization to the client via direct contact. It’s a fair characterization, but does not fully leverage their unique skills and opportunities. Sharp leaders will recognize that these people are perfectly placed to assess the experience of a single user to the potential benefit of all users.

Consider:

• A user engaging the support center may be a symptom of deficient self-help resources
• For each user who engages the support center for a topical problem, there are likely to be many users with neither the time nor the energy to do so
• A support team member who is alert to potential deficiencies is contributing to our organization’s continuous improvement; one who is racing the clock is doing the opposite
• Every time we fail to use the experience of a single user to identify and correct a deficiency in self-help support, we have missed the opportunity to solve the problem for every user

Let’s consider what would happen if success were defined by engaging select users to determine why they were not able to locate what they sought. Circumstances have brought these two together because the user was not able to solve the problem on his or her own. In collaboration, the rep and the client have the potential to discover lurking problems, including:

• Confusing instructions
• Gaps in the knowledgebase
• Non-intuitive navigation
• A layman’s synonym for company terminology
• Out-of-date content
• Duplicate resources
• Contradictory content
• Malfunctions

With more nuanced metrics, the strategic leader will recognize that there is a higher return on investment for a rep taking 20 minutes to identify and document a deficiency on the website than for celebrating the prowess of many reps taking only two minutes each to solve the same problem.

Of course, judgement is required. When the queue is full or the user is agitated, let’s not dally — solve the problem and move on. But when the universe is smiling upon us and an articulate, patient user is asking for help and call volume permits, let’s empower the rep to discover and document the deficiency to solve it for all users. Then give the rep and the supervisor bonuses. Tomorrow, you’ll have the whole team filling the QA pipeline.

Put another way, every confused user dealing with the support center represents an opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of our self-help resources, but when management’s zeal for efficiency inhibits the attention to detail needed to continuously improve our effectiveness, it is a swing and a miss.

Next Topic: Improving Performance with Advanced Tagging

Part X of this series shares practical insights into how to best label content for discovery using an advanced — but not difficult — tagging approach.

Directory of All Topics

Browse this directory to discover how to troubleshoot the often thorny problem(s) preventing our self-help, intranet, training, support and/or extranet knowledge bases from being incredibly useful.