Contact Center - Averages versus Optimization

We have saved firms significant amounts of money within their contact center operations. The savings are derived from discovering and fixing the high transaction/high cost areas through either efficiency improvements or technology upgrades.

In a nutshell, our process begins with a baseline. We understand the business drivers. Then we map the activities for each type of operation occurring within the contact center. Any activity can have no more than six steps – by our definition. We focus on the operation areas that have high transaction volume and a high cost. The next step is to model future state scenarios for better efficiency.

The “averages” discussion invariably arises when the management team begins to discuss the operation areas. Management begins to produce studies that show their performance within that operation conforms with industry averages. To quote the CEO of a recent client “If I have one foot in a bucket of ice water and the other in a fire, on average I am fine. But I am in severe pain.”

That is where averages are misleading. If the average cost to reset user login information (or take an order, or register a trouble ticket, etc) is six minutes, we know there are agents completing that task in three minutes and other agents in twelve minutes. If you can get every agent closer toward best practices, the company average for that task may drop to four minutes – or a 33% cost improvement.


Thus averages are totally misleading as a measure of optimization. That is why RSI has developed and continually refines its well tested (via client engagements) model to measure and reward the optimization of activities.