What the Numbers Can and Can’t Tell You

Rob Cramer · 3 min read

I like numbers. At Shaw I lived in Save Rate, Retained Revenue, CSAT and First Call Resolution, and I went through all of them with every agent every month. But a metric only tells you where to look. It never tells you what to do next.

Read metrics in pairs

One number on its own is easy to misread. The retention agent I coached at Shaw sat well below the team on retained revenue. That number alone says “weak closer.” Next to handle time, the story changed: the calls were very short. The agent was rushing and never finding out why customers wanted to cancel.

It’s the same reason I tracked First Call Resolution alongside CSAT. Each one covers the other’s blind spot. A team can post a good CSAT by passing hard problems along, or good resolution numbers by hurrying people off the phone. Read together, the two are harder to fool.

One person is off, or everyone is

The first question I ask of a red number is how many people it’s on. If one agent is off, that’s a coaching conversation. If several are off in the same way, it’s usually training, a script or a process. Coaching someone harder for a problem the process created fixes nothing.

That was the point of my monthly meetings with senior leadership at Shaw. I brought what the numbers and the floor were showing me about where operations were costing us, with a recommendation attached.

A pattern without a story is just a chart

For a stretch at Shaw I also led a team of 8 Workforce Analysts. We dug through contact centre metrics for abnormal patterns and improvement opportunities. My part was to tie each pattern back to the work happening on the floor — because an unusual number is only a question until someone explains it.

Same habit, different job

At LinkNow, retention reporting is how I find the root causes of churn, and the winback offers are built around those reasons. At Rogers, I built reporting on disability trends and case status in Excel, PowerBI and Tableau to run the function. Different data, same rule: find the cause before you pick the fix.

What I can’t tell you

I can’t prove which habit moved which number. At Shaw, Save Rate, Retained Revenue and CSAT all beat the department average together — 84% against 74%, 82% against 73%, 88% against 79% — and reading the data this way was part of how I coached. I’d rather say that plainly than claim a clean cause and effect.