Workforce Management Featured Article
Do You Track Metrics for Contact Center Convenience or Customer Experience Quality?
Contact centers today have a great deal of data, and most of them use at least some of it to track certain performance metrics. While this is wise, it’s important for companies to be sure they’re tracking metrics that measure customer service quality at least as often as they’re tracking metrics to control costs. Sure, keeping average handle time (AHT) low is good for controlling expenses, but it’s not always good for keeping customer satisfaction high. So it’s probably time to examine the metrics you are tracking today: are they indicative of what customers want and need?
According to a recent article by Sreeram Sreenivasan, founder of Ubiq, writing for the Chamber of Commerce Web site, one of the best ways to boost your support and provide a great customer experience is to know what your customers want from your product or service.
“However, you don’t have to explicitly ask them about it,” wrote Sreenivasan. “Tracking relevant metrics can give you an honest and clear understanding of their overall satisfaction.”
Keeping an eye on customer behavior can be a good start. What times of day are busiest for you during each weekday or weekend your contact center is open for business? Are you putting extra staff on the phones during this time, or are you simply letting call queues get longer? While the latter move may cost less, it will likely cause customer satisfaction to drop.
Instead of average handle time, consider emphasizing first response time as one of the most critical metrics. This is the amount of time it takes for a company to respond to a customer issue.
“It is one of the most important metrics that affects customer satisfaction,” wrote Sreenivasan. “If you keep the customer waiting, you are likely to bring down customer satisfaction considerably. Studies show that 53 percent of customers feel three minutes to be a reasonable response time while waiting for a customer support agent over the phone.”
If your first response time is long compared to industry benchmarks and getting longer, it’s time to make some improvements in call routing, skilling, workforce management and scheduling and the knowledge bases available to agents to find answers to customer questions. It could be about reorganizing the agent desktop: are there too many applications open? Do agents have to repeat data entry from application to application? Is there a way to consolidate processes? By bringing down first response time, companies can also bring down another critical metric, average resolution time, and boost the all-important first-call resolution.
“Measuring the performance of your customer service enables you to rapidly improve it,” wrote Sreenivasan. “It allows you to easily identify the key pain points of your customers, areas which need additional resources and support agents that can benefit from additional training. You can even streamline support by automating frequent responses and creating knowledge base or FAQs. This helps you improve your product or service, boost customer experience and grow your business faster.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi