Call center or contact center day-to-day operation is not easy, especially when it is handling customer calls or complaints. That is why this industry is big on call monitoring, mystery shopping, customer surveys, focus groups, and complaint solicitation.

And the industry needs a portfolio of approaches to provide comprehensive and balanced measures of service effectiveness.

An article on ICMI (International Customer Management  Institute) discusses what service industry needs to be:

• Efficient in their use of re sources
• Effective in the eyes of the customer. (Just to complicate matters, many service organizations have multiple customer constituencies, presenting more opportunities for conflicting effectiveness objectives.)

Why are these in conflict? Typically, to be more effective means having a buffer of resources to deal with unexpected demand. To make a rational trade-off decision requires good measurement of both efficiency and effectiveness. Yet, efficiency metrics typically win out. Why? Because efficiency is easy to define and measure with the operational systems we have in place to manage the service process. For example,

• Efficiency: Calls per day per service agent. Piece of cake to measure
• Effectiveness: Quality of the service delivered.

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