Last fall I participated again in the ICCM Canada Keynote Panel: 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes moderated by Paul Stockford from Saddletree Research. Dave Butler over at NACC recorded the session and has been distributing the ideas presented in his monthly newsletter. I keep promising him that I’ll expand one of mine into an article for him, but in the meantime here is the one he sent out today. Since it’s one of my favorite rants, I thought I would share (pardon my grammar):

Take out the garbage, I am not talking about employees or customers, I am actually talking about reports and data. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you walk into a call center and you see the reports that supervisors are looking at every day and the first column you see is calls answered,  and this is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was logged in for 15 hours, blah, blah, bah, blah. Step back and ask yourself what value you are getting out of this information. So take your 30 column report and pare it down to four or five columns that you can actually impact and actually take action on. If you can’t impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours or seven hours, get rid of the column. Just say, you know what, what was their schedule adherence, or what was their hold %? In other words, what are the columns that you can influence? Then write out the business value for each column on the report. Are you going to see service level on there, or outbound calls? Write down why you need to see that so you can articulate that back to the people that are managing to that data every day and why it is important.

I couldn’t have said it better myself