Performance Measurement

Soft Skills Benchmarking (SSB)

Soft Skills Benchmarking was developed in 1999 from a joint project between The Henley Centre and the Teleconomy Group. The brief was to define and understand what created Customer Delight within customer services communications, primarily business to customer telephone interactions.

Primarily offered as a mystery shopping tool, SSB is the closest method, outside of customer research, available to provide a measurement that mimics the caller experience, providing a thorough grounding in understanding agent performance and benchmarking against other organisations. Soft Skills Benchmarking uses research defined attributes, human call analysis, and a weighted computer model. The output from the computer model is an accurate reflection of the customer experience.

Each Soft Skills Benchmarking scheme is updated with the latest research to consistently ensure that it reflects today's caller much more accurately. The latest version of SSB incorporates the new survey carried out by Teleconomy on behalf of Cable & Wireless and Vertex. For more information about this survey, click here...

SSB measures 43 key attributes, which are inherent in all telephone interactions. These 43 attributes were rated on importance to the customer, by the customer. The attributes assess all areas of a telephone conversation, including:

Each call is split into four key areas (pre-announcement, announcement, handling and termination). This allows the analysis to define particular areas of weakness or strengths within each Benchmarks specific area. Each attribute within each stage is weighted on importance, and then each call stage is weighted on importance.

SSB measures all areas of a call including machine/human elements, professionalism, quality and resolution. But it is also versatile in the sense that analysts can also provide statistics for internal standards.

SSB is used at three levels dependent upon the required objectives. At a Strategic level, SSB provides a statistical measurement giving cross sector comparisons and encompasses all aspects of the call. At an Operational level, clients use SSB as a performance management tool looking at internal team comparisons as well as cross sector. Finally SSB can be used at an Operator level to look at the individual skills sets and identify training needs.

Return to our overview of research methods.