Workforce Management Featured Article
Do You Know Your Customer Effort Score?
We all know some of the leading performance indicators in the contact center, but are these metrics outdated?
Some of the most important metrics for the typical contact center include average wait time, speed to answer, average handle time, first contact resolution, and abandon rate. These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for most contact center managers.
The world of the contact center no longer is just the phone bank, however; the modern contact center also handles channels such as chat, email and social media. The traditional KPIs at most firms don’t adequately assess the modern contact center in light of these new communication mediums.
Further, the balance of power has shifted from producers to consumers; businesses no longer are in the driver seat, as consumers can easily find the competition with a few clicks of a mouse or taps on an iPhone (News - Alert). This puts new rewards on delivering a good customer experience, since increasingly what sets a business apart from its competition is how it delivers on its customers’ needs and concerns.
While traditional KPIs still are relevant and important, contact center management also should investigate ways to better assess success in this new environment.
Two new metrics have emerged in the last few years as important benchmarks for contact center success: net promoter score and customer effort score.
Net promoter score (NPS) is a customer loyalty and satisfaction metric that measures existing loyalty between providers and consumers by asking consumers if they would recommend the company, product, or service to a friend or colleague. This is one of the KPIs for gauging customer experience success.
The other, customer effort score (CES (News - Alert)), assesses the amount of effort that a customer had to spend in order to resolve an issue. While not as direct as NPS, CES nonetheless is a clear indicator of how a contact center is performing—and where NPS will be heading in the near future, since businesses that make consumers work for resolutions to their problems is not often a business that develops brand advocates.
Both NPS and CES are harder to calculate than the traditional KPIs, but they are important when assessing the actual performance of the contact center and the business overall in keeping customers happy. Contact centers would be wise to make sure they develop processes to both collect and gauge these new metrics.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi