What Your Contact Center QBR Should Actually Be Talking About

There is a disconnect in many customer operations.

The metrics that dominate day-to-day management are often the same metrics presented to senior executives: average handle time, service levels, quality scores, transaction volumes and other measures of operational performance.

Those metrics matter.

But according to Quantanite Chief Growth Officer David Brown, they are often answering the wrong question at the executive level. A CEO, CFO, or senior customer leader does not primarily need to know whether average handle time has changed by 15 seconds.

They need to know what customer operations did for the business.

“It’s about how we are impacting their business, their customers and the experience that those customers are having.”

That shift from reporting operational activity to demonstrating business impact has significant implications for how organisations measure customer operations and how BPO providers define the value they deliver.

Operational excellence isn’t the same as business impact

A well-run contact centre needs operational KPIs. The problem is not measuring them. It is elevating them beyond what they can actually tell us.

An operation can meet its service level and still have unhappy customers. It can reduce handle time while also increasing repeat contacts. It can achieve a strong QA score without addressing the broken process that caused the customer to call in the first place.

At the executive level, Brown argues that the conversation should therefore move upward: “Are the retention rates up? Is the satisfaction of those customers up? That means that their revenue line will improve.”

That is a different standard of accountability.

Rather than asking only whether the contact centre performed efficiently, it asks whether that performance produced something meaningful for the organisation.

• Retention
• Customer satisfaction
• Revenue
• ROI

Those are the outcomes that connect customer operations to the priorities of the wider business. 

If we spend too much time on AHT, other operational metrics, or QA in a quarterly business review with senior leaders of our customers, we are not meeting their expectations.

Brown isn’t arguing that operational KPIs should disappear: “Of course you have got to do that daily and weekly. But on a quarterly basis, executives don’t want to spend time worrying about that.

The contact centre manager needs metrics that help run the operation today. The executive needs evidence that customer operations are making the business better. Those are related conversations, but they are not the same conversation. 

What should replace the traditional QBR?

The executive conversation becomes much more interesting once operational metrics are treated as supporting evidence rather than the headline.

Brown describes the questions senior leaders should be asking:

“Is my ROI improving? How are my NPS scores with my customers? What impact is that having on my revenue? How are you changing my supply lines or influencing my thinking on how I manage my supply chain and customer interaction model, and how are you helping me improve them?

The last part is particularly important. The value of customer operations should not stop at the contact centre boundary. Every customer conversation contains information about the wider organisation.

• Product issues
• Billing problems
• Fulfillment failures
• Policy friction
• Communication gaps
• Digital journey problems
• Expectations that business is failing to meet

A provider that reports only on its operation can tell a client how effectively it processed the work it received. A strategic partner should be able to tell the client what that work reveals about the wider business.

Customer contact is business intelligence

This changes how leaders should think about the enormous volume of customer interaction data passing through their operations.

A contact is not simply a unit of work. It is also a signal. Taken collectively, those signals can answer commercially important questions. 

• What is frustrating customers?
• Which issues are recurring?
• What is affecting satisfaction?
• Where are customers experiencing unnecessary effort?
• Which problems may be contributing to churn?
• What does customer behaviour tell us about our products, policies, or processes?

And what should the business change as a result? That turns the contact centre from an operational endpoint into an intelligence source. 

It also creates a higher bar for BPO relationships. Reporting that 80% of calls were answered within a target timeframe demonstrates operational performance. Showing that a recurring issue is affecting satisfaction, identifying what is driving it and helping the business determine what to change demonstrates something else entirely: business value.

The provocative question: why did the customer need us?

Brown recalls a customer expressing the idea particularly starkly: “A customer of mine about six months ago said to me that every contact received is a wasted contact.”

Taken literally, that is too broad. There are valuable customer conversations. Sales interactions create opportunities. Complex problems genuinely require assistance. Some moments of human engagement strengthen a customer relationship. 

But the provocation raises an important question: why did the customer contact the business? 

Brown provides straightforward examples: “Any interaction like ‘Where is my product?’ or ‘You overbilled me’ is poor quality and should be removed.”

A customer asking where an order is does not fundamentally want a better support interaction. They want to know where their order is. A customer calling about an incorrect bill does not want the issue resolved efficiently. They want the bill to have been correct. 

These interactions tell the business something important about the customer experience outside the contact centre. That is why simply measuring how well they were handled is insufficient. 

A better QBR should change the business

That is ultimately the opportunity for customer operations leaders and their partners. The QBR should not simply prove that the contact centre did its job. It should help the business understand its customers better.

Operational performance still belongs in the conversation. But it should provide context for a more important discussion: 

• What are customers telling us?
• Where are we creating friction?
• What is affecting satisfaction and retention?
• What action should the business take?
• What changed because we took it?

That is a much higher-value conversation than simply reviewing a dashboard of contact centre KPIs. It also creates a much higher standard for customer operations. This is because the most valuable insight a contact centre can provide is not how efficiently it handled the interactions it received. It may be what those interactions reveal about how the business needs to change.