Dan Boehm, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Spectrum (News - Alert) Corporation, writes a blog concerning his work and experiences in the contact center industry “calling on and working with contact centers from around the world.”

A good recent post concerned him speaking with a Director of Operations in charge of a Help Desk Customer Service Center. As Boehm said, “this director was interested in metrics he should be using for his operation. One issue that he mentioned at the beginning of the conversation was that he did not want typical call center statistics.”

Good to see somebody looking for a new approach and a bit of creativity in call center metrics. For far too long companies have just been copying “what everybody else does.”

Boehm said their conversation explored what the director’s goals were for the center, and the differences between inhouse and outsourced customer service centers: “I have found that inhouse centers focus on the number of tickets opened and closed while outsourced centers fixate on SLA's.”

Considering this fact, Boehm suggested that for an outsourced service center the following metrics, among others, not in any order of priority, should be considered: Total Number of Tickets Logged per Product (real time and for the day), Total Time Worked per Ticket and per Product, Average Number of Tickets per Product, Average Time Worked per Ticket per Product and Tickets Opened per Product real time and for the day (“This differs from tickets logged,” Boehm notes.)

Boehm also mentions Tickets opened per Product for the Day, Service Level real time for the day per Product / All Product / Group, Tickets Closed pre Product real time / day and Average Handle Time per Ticket per Product -- “this can be a misleading metric,” though, he warns.

Companies might also want to look at such metrics as Max Handle Time per Ticket per Product, Max Handle Time all Tickets / Products, First Call Resolution per Product, Tickets resolved in X hours since Logged per Product, Tickets resolved in 8 hours since Logged per Product, Tickets resolved in 24 hours since Logged per Product, Tickets unresolved for the day / week per Product and Tickets escalated per Product for the day

“All of these metrics should be run by group and by agent as well,” Boehm said, adding that this level of detail can show which groups are performing well and which CSR (News - Alert) needs training: “There are many idiosyncrasies with help desk metrics that can be misleading and should be analyzed prior to using the data in performance reviews.”