Future modules will be released as they are created. SUBSCRIBE on YouTube and turn notifications on so you don’t miss the next one! Welcome everyone. I’m Jeff Rumburg, Managing Partner of MetricNet. In Metrics Essentials for Contact Center Professionals, my goal is to teach you everything you need to know, to leverage metrics for success in your contact center. Today, in the third module of our course, we’re going to discuss the contact center balanced scorecard. The balanced score gives you a holistic, 360 degree view of your contact center performance. This is important because no single metric tells the whole story or gives you a complete picture of your performance. But the balanced scorecard fixes this problem by normalizing and aggregating the contact center KPIs into a single, overall measure of performance. You will recall that in the last module of the course we discussed the 80/20 rule for contact center metrics. The 80/20 rule is how we derive the six KPIs for an inbound customer service contact center. Those KPIs are summarized on this slide, with the final, and most important KPI, being the balanced score. The balanced score is a metric that aggregates the most important contact center metrics – such as cost per contact and customer satisfaction – into a single, all-inclusive measure of contact center performance. The value of this metric, when tracked over time, is that it enables you to determine whether your overall performance is improving, flat, or decreasing. Moreover, it provides a useful benchmark for comparing your performance against other contact centers. Oftentimes, when a contact center attempts to communicate its performance to other stakeholders in the business, particularly to individuals who are unfamiliar with contact center operations, they quickly become overwhelmed by the minutia of such measures as speed of answer and call abandonment rate, and they are uncertain about how to interpret the results. They are likely to focus on one, easily-understood metric like speed of answer, and draw conclusions about overall contact center performance based on this one metric. This is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. It’s therefore absolutely critical to communicate the overall performance of the contact center, and the balanced scorecard does that for you. In this way, a contact center can track its overall performance, and, in any given month, you may see costs go up or customer satisfaction go down or speed of answer increase, but these individual metrics take on a secondary level of importance because the balanced score provides a more complete and accurate picture of overall contact center performance. Creating a balanced scorecard in Excel is relatively straightforward. You can follow along on this slide as I explain the process. First, you select the metrics to include in your scorecard. We recommend using the six KPIs that we have already discussed. They are listed in the left hand column of the Excel table. Depending upon the metrics you track in your contact center, you may choose fewer metrics, or a different mix of metrics for your scorecard. Secondly, you establish a weighting for each metric based upon its relative importance in the scorecard. This is a judgment call, but we suggest overweighting cost and customer satisfaction, since these are the foundation metrics for the contact center. Step 3 is to show a reasonable range of performance – worst case to best case – for each metric. Normally these performance ranges are derived from a benchmark of your contact center. But, if you don’t have benchmarking data, you can simply ask yourself, what is the worst possible scenario, and what is the best possible scenario for each metric in your particular contact center. In step 4 your performance for each metric is inserted into the third column from the right. The value you provide here will be your average performance over some period of time. It could be your performance over a month, a quarter, or even a year. Most contact centers use a monthly value here, and as a result the balanced score will be the overall performance for that particular month. A score for each metric is then calculated based on the interpolation formula in step 5. This score tells you how far along the path you are from the worst performance to the best performance. And finally, a balanced score for each metric is determined by multiplying the metric weighting by the metric score. And when the balanced scores for each metric are summed up, you have the total balanced score for your contact center! In this example, the contact center balanced score is 51.4%. Your balanced score will always range from 0% (if you have the worst possible performance for every metric in the scorecard) to 100% (if you have the best possible performance for every metric in the scorecard). The contact center balanced score can be used to benchmark your contact center on a fair, apples-to-apples basis against other contact centers. This page shows how the contact center in our example compares to 20 other contact centers in their benchmarking peer group. It turns out that the contact center in our example has a very average score. When we run hundreds of contact centers through this balanced scorecard algorithm, we get a normal distribution centered right at 50%. Those who score above 65% on their balanced score are typically in the top quartile; those who score between 50% and 65% are in the second quartile; those between 35% and 50% are in the third quartile; and those below 35% are generally in the bottom quartile for overall contact center performance. The balanced scorecard is an ideal way to track, trend, and benchmark your contact center performance over time. This slide shows the trend in one company’s contact center performance over a 12-month period of time. The blue bars in the chart represent the monthly balanced scores, while the green background represents the 12-month trailing trend in contact center performance. You can clearly see that the performance trend for this particular contact center is improving. I would encourage you to download the scorecard template in Excel format from the Resources section of this course module. This concludes the third module of our metrics course. I would invite you to join me for Module 4, where we will discuss the Cause-and-Effect relationships between the KPIs we have studied so far. I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m Jeff Rumburg, Managing Partner of MetricNet.
