Death to redundant KPI's

We’re reporting on what?

Part of the innovation within the Customer Services Area of AMP started with how we were measuring our people. That sits at the heart of high performance. Are your measures clear, are they strategically congruent, are they limited to as few as possible, can you report on them, and do they reward the right behaviour!

I’ve been in many organisations where the long list of KPIs filling the page is like a badge of honour in customer service teams. The more you measure and report on, the better you are, right? In my experience, not at all. Quite the opposite. The fewer, more meaningful KPIs, the better.

If you are able to show how multiple behaviours help deliver a key KPI, you will support your people to be wildly more successful than listing out and measuring all the individual behaviours separately. It might make you feel like a champion having a long list of stuff you are measuring, but it won’t drive the right outcome. After all, it’s about outcomes, not tasks!

Clear as mud!

We weren’t immune to this at AMP. We had a page full of KPIs and a bunch of reporting that took way too long to create. Consultants had the usual suspects of KPIs and the industry standard of things to be constantly trying to think about, all while trying to focus on the customer and deliver a great, meaningful, useful experience: Average Handle Time (AHT), Abandon Rate, Grade of Service (GoS), Customer Satisfaction/Net Promoter Score (cSat/NPS), First Call Resolution (FCR), Quality… the list goes on. The challenge with this approach is threefold:

1.      You take the focus on the consultant away from that moment with the customer

2.      You are doubling up on KPIs with KPIs that are redundant or actually deliver to other KPIs

3.      You are wasting valuable time with unnecessary reporting

The Solution:

One of the first things we did, was look to remove duplicates by understanding the difference between KPIs/Targets and Metrics. For right or wrong, here’s how we defined them:

· KPIs / Targets: the targets we give to our consultants that will define what success looks like

·       Metrics: data we may engage to help us better understand the results against the KPIs/Targets, but not actual targets for our consultants.

Hand in hand was understanding what KPIs in the old list, were redundant given they were being measured in another KPI.

Take, for example, Average Handle Time (AHT) which was one of the long list of KPIs our consultants had to keep top of mind while on the phones. Why should the consultant care about AHT? Because it helped us achieve Grade of Service (GoS). But we measure Grade of Service… so surely if we measure GoS, then we don’t need to also measure AHT. Exactly! So GoS was the KPI and AHT was a supporting metric.

But hang on… why is GoS important to us?

Grade of Service measures the % of calls we answer in a certain amount of time. We care about how quickly someone picks up the phone so that our customers have a great experience. But we use cSat/NPS to measure if our customers are happy. So GoS is simply another one of the metrics that helps us understand the NPS/cSat result. That means we can retire Average Handle Time (AHT) and Grade of Service (GoS) because we measure cSat/NPS!

So, instead of giving our consultants/Team Leaders AHT, GoS and NPS/cSat targets, just give them the cSat target and use the other data points as metrics to help explain the NPS/cSat result.

That’s not to say that the metrics arent important, just that what is more important is to get really crisp on what the KPI’s are. Also, people are smarter than we give them credit for. Given the chance, they will understand how keeping an eye on AHT will help them with their cSat target. But ultimately, cSat is what is really important and the reason we bothered measuring AHT and GoS in the first place!

If only!

If I had my way, we’d have 3 targets only:

1.      eSat

2.      cSat

3.      Quality

How well do we delight our people (eSat), how well do we delight our customers (cSat), and how well do we delight the regulator (Quality). We have come a long way from 10+ targets to less than 5. A brilliant result that the team is (and should be) really proud of.

Simplifying the KPI landscape also helped us to create PowerBI dashboards so that everyone has access to the teams, the leaders and their own KPIs. We have just rolled this out to our leaders, and in 2025 we will roll it out to each of our consultants so they can have real-time access to their results to empower them to make their own adjustments and, hopefully, take ownership of the results conversations with their leaders so they move away from “what are the numbers” to “how can we work together to help you deliver even better results”.

Importantly, this change was only made possible because the leaders were driving the change.

Challenge everything we use to measure success … why not!