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ARCHIVED - Using External Service Delivery Key Performance Indicators


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4. Implementing Service Delivery KPIs for Phone Services

Overview

There are currently over 130 GoC call centres answering over 300million calls per year from citizens, businesses, and visitors.[1] These points of service have implemented a wide variety of technologies, business processes, and staffing strategies. Historical factors such as departmental mergers and new or changed legislation have all contributed to this "silo" service delivery model.

From the earliest days of the call centre business, a management commitment to measurement has contributed to building call centre performance into a near science. The service channel is itself strongly serviced by professional associations, academic research, a strong and highly visible network of experienced consultants, and comprehensive Internet resources. Agent resourcing models such Erlang C and Hills B are well documented and enthusiastically debated.

Today, GoC telephony service managers usually manage their service centres with the support of automated call distribution (ACD) technologies. The ACD receives inbound calls; routes them to automated scripts for screening, self-service, and categorization; and then places remaining calls in carefully monitored queues for specific agents or agent groups. Advanced ACDs route calls to appropriately skilled agents at other networked call centres as call loads grow. With so many options available to telephony service managers, the primary challenge for the Government of Canada is to identify a small set of core KPIs that can be used consistently and provide effective comparability on an enterprise basis.

Selected Management Tools

Unlike the other primary service channels, the Phone Channel is supported by a significant number of highly competitive vendors. Products such as Nortel's Symposium and Cisco's ICM have been strategic acquisitions for GoC departments. Because of the wide disparity in GoC call centre size, many small business solutions are also in use. Readers should also be aware that products such as ICM and Symposium have many components that are designed to integrate with existing technologies. It is realistic that some GoC centres may in the future use a combination of commercial products, depending on their requirements and budget."

Performance Management Example: Managing Phone Service at Canada Revenue Agency

CRA is well recognized for its efforts and investments in managing service channels. With a critical business requirement to provide extensive phone services to the taxpayers of Canada, CRA has developed, over decades, a strong management discipline and intensive technical skills in the management of large-scale call centre operations.

CRA uses a high-capacity network to instantly respond to queues and peak calling periods. In the past two years, a consistent effort has succeeded in consolidating technologies. This has resulted in lower operating costs and better capabilities. 

CRA has relied on a disciplined management reporting process to collect and analyze operational performance measures on a weekly basis. Individual call centre managers complete structured reports that are filed with the corporate performance measurement team. Operational statistics and call patterns are discussed at a weekly conference call. By Friday, senior managers have last week's performance statistics at their fingertips!

For the purposes of this report, we have selected products in use by Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) call centres as a representative sample to support this guide. These products include:

  • Northern PBX (MAX 6, MAX 7)
  • Centrex MAX 100
  • Centrex Perimeter
  • Nortel Symposium

At the time of publication, information concerning Cisco's ICM product had not been received; it may be added in a future revision. As the Secretariat does not endorse commercial products, contact information for vendors is not provided.