29: Metrics with Chris Taylor

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

And welcome back to episode 29 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is metrics, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Chris Taylor. So, Chris, the topic for today is our favourite. It's metrics. And I know that you know there are many, many ways we can measure our service. I'd be interested in your thoughts and philosophies around metrics.

Chris Taylor: 0:50

Yeah, sure. Um I am a sucker for metrics. I love reporting, I love data. Bring in to light new metrics that have never been seen before. There are so many out there you can easily start drowning in them. I worked in an operation once where we had 15 different metrics that we were tracking on a weekly, daily basis. And because they had become such a crutch, like you need to hit this metric consistently to achieve this goal, it just completely crippled the team. And it meant that you had no flexibility and you started treating your staff like we're in the army running drills. Know what you want to show. Know your goals and how your metrics relate to them, and don't muddy the water with random metrics. For example, if you're a highly technical company like Type where I currently work, um you wouldn't necessarily measure first FCR or first call resolution or first contact resolution, it's called, because uh you're not going to resolve a ticket on the first contact. So why bother measuring it? It just distorts the narrative.

Charlotte Ward: 1:51

Yeah, yeah. I th I I think narrative is the word, isn't it? It's actually about part of what we're trying to do, is is telling stories, isn't it? That's the thing I always tell people about metrics is know what questions you're trying to ask of them before you go and pull a bunch of numbers. You know, it's actually figure out what's important to your organization and your team as well as the you know what the business um needs to know about and and ask the right questions and then figure out how you can answer it. But yeah, I'm with you. Definitely, definitely don't drown in them. And and you know, how often do you see a new manager just go and load up the default dashboards and run with it?

Chris Taylor: 2:28

Absolutely. It's it's so widespread because I think it's just in our nature to present as much as we can see when sometimes it's not relevant. Uh, an example of when it's good to pick into a metric that you wouldn't usually look at, um, I can give you is I I wrote a business case once to get an investment in a bit of technology that was worth about 300,000 pounds. I had to prove that it would make its money back. So I started looking at our abandoned calls. If we're abandoning X percentage of calls, and you can assume that X percentage of those calls will convert into revenue, then by losing this percentage, you're losing this amount of revenue potentially. You can look at metrics you wouldn't usually look at and pull something out of it that's relevant. But you're so spot on. When I came to Tyke in June last year, I came in, there was a help desk set up, um, it had a standard dashboard, and for for the first month or two, I just sat there looking at this dashboard, and then I really started prying like, why am I looking at first contact resolution? It's just not relevant. Um, our cop our product is way too complex. And and you build out reporting in a cohesive way. So I tend to look at it from the position of I look at my stakeholders, who who's seeing this data? What do they need to find out from that data? So, yeah, you're spot on. It's about defining the goal, defining the audience. What do they want to see? How do you show that?

Charlotte Ward: 3:46

It's metrics in plural as well, isn't it? It's not just about that first contact resolution rate or any other single metric, actually, unless you're really trying to drill down on a specific story as a one-off exercise. Really, more generally, when you're measuring a service, you are looking at a set of metrics, and yeah, you have to bear in mind how those metrics play off each other and affect the story you're trying to tell, right? How do you draw key metrics together to tell a story?

Chris Taylor: 4:16

You have to tie each of these metrics into how you want that customer to feel when they're reacting with your brand. Let's say we've got a great first response time, but we're not responsive. So we have delays between tickets or something like that. That's obviously something that needs to be looked at because while you're given a great first response, it might be slightly delayed, and that's causing customer issues down the line. The end goal should be to have a great customer experience, and all of your metrics essentially should be what makes that happen.

Charlotte Ward: 4:47

And understanding how they interplay. So if you enter the slightly dangerous territory of making a metric a target as a standalone entity without understanding how it fits into that set, if you get two laser focused on one, it can have a big impact without you really realizing it, I think.

Chris Taylor: 5:04

Take the example of focusing on um answering a phone call as quickly as possible. While that's obviously in everyone's best interest, you might have an agent sitting in like after call work, which means they're typing up notes from their last call, and you're demanding that they go on quicker and quicker and quicker to pick up this call that's waiting. But you what you're missing is the impact that has on the call they had before. They can't leave effective notes and it just becomes a vicious cycle. So you're yeah, you're absolutely right. You have to think of your metrics holistically and across the board rather than isolated pops or silos, because as soon as you silo them, they'll start becoming in conflict with one another. Yeah, that's a really good point.

Charlotte Ward: 5:46

And I think you raise a really interesting example there. If you curtail your agent's ability to create effective notes, if you really are so focused on their um their response times, it might seem though the only fit the only thing that you're affecting is their the ability for another agent to pick up that ticket, but actually that could also impact the quality of your knowledge base. It impacts the quality of any bug reports. It's a wider communication issue if you focus too much on in your example, if you if you focus too much on that response time. And and those other effects are actually a little bit more nebulous, aren't they? They're a little bit more difficult to grasp. So um, I guess you could, if you're lucky, catch that in a quality program, but you have to have the right quality program in place as well, then, and that's another metric. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash twenty nine for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.