Hello all - not sure if this is the right forum but here we go anyway! We are currently having a heated debate on giving Customer Service staff a value add KPI (such as up-selling) on inbound calls. Even though we appreciate the components of value add, we don't believe it should be a separate KPI as it could lead to 'unsavoury' behaviour amongst other things. Do you have any other ideas on why this shouldn't be a separate KPI that could help our argument? Alternatively, do you have a value add KPI in your Customer Service call center and if so, how does it effect your staff?

>>>Do you have any other ideas on why this shouldn't be a separate KPI that could help our argument?>>>


Well firstly my motivation for contributing is not to help one side of an argument or the other when I dont have full possession of the facts. I simply give my experience and opinion.
That aside, any meddling with KPI's should seriously be considered in terms of the impact that they have on the job description and contract of employment. KPI's for an intrinsic part of the job desciption and appraisal process as such were described IN FULL when the employee took the job. Any alteration to this could be considered to be an alteration to the employer/employer contract.

Have you talked to HR? Which country are you in? What is written in your existing KPI's and employment contract. What about customer impact?

We also sell on inbound calls, and have offer rates and conversions from offers as KPIs.

What we have had to consider is the impact of offering and selling on other KPIs.

For example AHT, not that i'm advocating it as a KPI, i'd much prefer to see "controlling the call" as a strongly weighted element of the call QAing process, but it is the easiest example to explain what i mean.

So we have agents who offer to a much higher percentage of customers, this inherently increases their AHT as they have to go through a regulated script, and of course high sellers also then have to go through the data grabbing exercise to complete the sale, also increasing AHT.

We don't get too many complaints about having selling as a KPI as they are commissioned on sales anyway and can make quite a tidy sum from what is quite a soft sale really.

Hi Amber,

I suppose this depends on the overall marketing- and sales strategy.
Are you employed in a hard selling environment? Then I guess the ultimate outcome might be the three "F's" If you are in an environment where customer life time value is management then it all depends on a complex set of factors which are to be properly analysed for the system to suggest"to upsell or not to upsell" Ay, there's the rub.

Thanks everyone for your input. We won the actual debate with your help and actually converted quite a few people in the audience from pro value add to no value add due to our arguments! Whether we actually implement a Value Add KPI or not, is still to be seen!

Cheers,
Amber