What Is a Balanced Scorecard?

What Are Balanced Scorecards?

A balanced scorecard divides metrics into categories. These categories should reflect the fundamental areas of contact centre performance.

For example, categories could include “advisor”, “customer” and “business”. An alternative might be “people”, “customers”, “financial” and “process”.

Whatever the case, the goal is to track a relatively equal number of metrics across each category to achieve a well-balanced centre and clear view of performance.

Yet, to a degree, balanced scorecards have disappeared over the past five to ten years. Why? Because contact centres:

• Failed to create a data flow to track/measure each metric easily
• Overloaded the scorecard and became confused over which metrics to prioritize
• Tampered with metrics to mislead executives about actual performance
• Failed to teach stakeholders about the subtleties of productivity metrics

However, this has had a detrimental impact on the contact centre – as many now lack an understanding of how metrics influence one another.

“Bringing back the principle of the balanced scorecard – so businesses understand the relationship between processes, customers and costs – is important,” says Ian Golding, Founder of the Customer Experience Consultancy. “That discipline needs to return.”

Having a clear picture of performance also positively differentiates the balanced scorecards while benchmarking examines metrics in isolation.