It’s Not You, It’s Your Metrics: How Legacy KPIs are Hurting the Customer Experience

You’ve invested in AI-powered tools, you’ve developed a comprehensive adoption plan, and you’ve created an engaging employee training program to ensure everyone is on the same page about your company’s CX optimization strategy.

In short: you’ve changed almost everything about the way you run your business to boost efficiency without compromising quality.

So why are you still using yesterday’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure today’s standards?

First, some comforting news: you’re not alone.

64% of contact center leaders say their current KPIs don't accurately measure the customer experience, and only 16% say they have the data they need to truly understand their customers.[**]

What’s So Bad About Legacy CX Metrics?

Why do old-school, more traditional CX KPIs like average handle time, hold time, or cost per contact no longer cut it?

First, they’re outdated. You can’t accurately evaluate the contact centers of today using metrics designed for the contact centers of five years ago. 

Legacy metrics don’t even have the language to accurately describe today’s customer experience, let alone evaluate it. Legacy KPIs were designed for single-channel call centers, not omnichannel contact centers. They were developed for a time where the extent of "customer self-service" was either a website form or an endless IVR menu. Most importantly, legacy metrics were built for the contact center world before AI. AI doesn’t just give businesses deeper insights into the holistic customer experience - it’s fundamentally changed contact center operations.

Second, customer expectations have changed. AI has also completely transformed customer expectations – but even if AI had never come along, customer expectations never ever stay stagnant.

 Customer priorities change, the way customers interact with businesses changes, and standards for what makes a “good” customer experience change. Relying on legacy KPIs could very easily end up doing more harm to the customer experience than good. For example, look at average handle time. A lot of businesses think that longer call times are killing customer satisfaction, but the truth is that your agents are taking the time to make genuine customer connections and provide personalized service – which is exactly what customers want. If you tell agents to speed up call times because you think customers care about speed more than anything else, you end up eliminating the thing that keeps customers coming back.

Old CX metrics are reactive, not predictive. Historic KPIs tell you what happened in the past, real-time monitoring tells you what’s happening right now, but neither one tells you what’s about to happen or why things went right or wrong. 

A lot of companies to find this out by monitoring even more KPIs, hoping that they’ll randomly stumble upon the “magic metric” that will fix everything. But legacy KPIs are purely qualitative, not quantitative. Legacy KPIs don’t tell the full story, and they don’t help contact centers predict or prevent CX failures–they just hoard data.

Standard KPIs also lack context and perpetuate single-channel thinking in an omnichannel world. But the KPIs themselves aren’t the only ones to blame: disconnected applications, bloated tech stacks, and siloed data are also at fault. Let’s say you have three different applications for each of your communication channels: 1 app for voice calling, 1 app for website chat, and 1 app for social media messaging. If these apps aren’t integrated and sharing data with each other, you can’t even get the whole customer conversation history, let alone accurate analytics.

Legacy metrics are built for cost centers, not value centers. Traditional KPIs position AI-powered solutions a money suck, not as tools that help you provide a top-tier customer experience. Busiess leaders should stop conflating “KPI monitoring” with “how to identify ways to lower costs” and start seeing KPI monitoring as a way to improve CX - because a good customer experience is what really increases revenue and lowers operating costs.

The Consequences of Measuring The Wrong KPIs

Swearing by outdated, irrelevant KPIs doesn’t just throw a wrench in a few aspects of your operations – it has a domino effect on the entire customer experience.

Relying on yesterday’s KPIs can: 

• Lead to increased customer churn and high customer abandonment
• Make it harder to secure investment and executive buy-in for future CX investments 
• Decrease customer satisfaction and net promoter scores (two key “evergreen” CX KPIs)
• Cost you your competitive edge
• Increase agent turnover

The New KPI Categories

In an era where customer experience (CX) is the competitive battleground, contact centers need to rethink how to measure success. Today's KPIs should focus on outcomes and experiences, not just outputs and efficiency.

These New KPIs on the block fall into 5 main categories: 

1. Customer-Centric KPIs

Customer-centric KPIs evaluate the overall customer experience.

Examples of crucial customer-centric metrics include:

• Customer lifetime value 
• Customer retention rate 
• Customer acquisition rate
• Customer win-back rate

2. Operational KPIs 

Operational KPIs evaluate productivity and efficiency. 

Essential operational KPIs include: 

• Proactive outreach success rate
• Time to resolution
• Interaction-to-resolution ration
• Agent utilization rate 
• First response time

3. Employee-Centric KPIs 

Employee-Centric KPIs evaluate agent performance and engagement. 

The most important employee-centric metrics are: 

• Interaction quality score 
• Constant outcomes per hour
• Agent engagement score 
• Goal achievement rate 
• Qualified upsell conversion rate

4. AI Impact KPIs

AI Impact KPIs evaluate the impact, value, and efficacy of your AI tools. 

Crucial AI impact metrics are: 

• AI containment rate
• AI conversion rate 
• AI vs human CSAT scores 
• AI automation throughput 
• AI adoption rate

5. Conversational VoC Intelligence

Conversational VoC Intelligence includes AI-powered Voice of the Customer insights. Essential VoC feedback to monitor includes: 

• Trend and keyword analysis 
• Agent empathy score 
• Agent performance monitoring 
• Customer intent monitoring 
• Customer sentiment analysis and emotion detection

10 Best Practices For Better CX KPI Monitoring

1. Select a vendor that offers automated AI reporting+KPI monitoring across all channels and touchpoints -- plus customizable reporting templates, predictive analytics, and real-time SLA alerts. 

2. Take a CX Assessment or AI Maturity test to identify where your contact center is excelling and where it's falling behind

3. Create your own metrics for CX success, like a CX score or custom agent performance scorecard

4. Integrate multiple feedback sources -- there is no "single source of truth" in CX. Focus groups, social media comments, online reviews, or internal QA all provide valuable information

5. Close the loop with customers. Let them know you've received and acted on their feedback to encourage future survey participation

6. Monitor overall KPIs in addition to channel-specific KPIs -- because CX differs across channels

7. Don't overlook Employee Experience metrics like Employee NPS or Employee Effort Score -- your employees have an enormous influence on your CX KPIs

8. Start with strategy: anchor KPIs to contact center goals, purpose, and priorities. This ensures your KPIs actually demonstrate business value and emphasize the "why"

9.. Clearly define what your metrics mean, what they measure, and how they're calculated. Eliminate confusion before it happens, clarify performance expectations, and create an internal KPI dictionary. Run tests to ensure methodology is sound, scores are accurate, and that the KPIs you've selected truly demonstrate value

10. Align metrics with accountability and action plans. Clarify who is "responsible" for outcomes, what to do if expectations aren't met, and involve agents in the discussion when auditing KPIs.