Workforce Management Featured Article
The Only Call Center Metrics That Counts Are the Ones that Make Your Customers Happier
Today, about 80 percent of contact centers collect some type of metrics, or operational telemetry about how their contact center works. Traditional metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and calls in queue are useful to help a company with its schedule and find the best areas for remedial training, but these metrics don’t do much for customers. (And one has to worry about those 20 percent of contact centers that measure no metrics at all.)
Many companies are guilty of running a contact center for their own convenience and under a rigid budget that never changes and seldom allows for improvement. In reality, however, the most important metrics for a company to track – and today they have more data than ever before so every contact center has the capability – are those that directly relate to the customer’s experience with the organization, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“A workforce optimization solution delivers a wealth of data covering nearly every aspect of customer engagement,” he wrote. “All of these metrics are important and can contribute to a more efficient business. But managers should never lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of information gathering is to improve customer satisfaction.”
In fact, some more traditional metrics such as average handle time can work against customers: agents, in a rush to keep AHTs down, may rush the customer off the phone before his or her problem is solved, which leads to angry customers who need to call back again at a later time. That costs the company more money in the long run. For this reason, it’s critical that contact centers track the quality of their operations from the customers’ standpoints, and this means robust monitoring.
“Without proper focus on quality monitoring, it’s possible to improve the efficiency of a contact center without achieving the same improvement in customer service,” wrote Ciarlo. “The most important metrics are those that link directly to making your customers happier.”
A business-focused contact center might look great on paper: low call times, low call queues, a high percentage of customers diverted to self-service, etc., but in reality, all the company has done is sacrifice the quality of the customer experience to make the manager look good to his superiors. Poll the customers, and you’re likely to find a deep well of problems that can erode customer loyalty and cause churn. Companies today should be surveying customers to determine what they want and need, and whether they’re getting it from your organization.
“That starts with customer service scores gathered through surveys and other means, followed by stats on service level and first-call resolution rate,” wrote Ciarlo. “Another figure that is trending upward is return on investment at the contact center. At first this seems out of place, but a spokesperson for the company behind the poll found that these four metrics are more closely related than one might think.”
By deemphasizing organizational-facing metrics like AHT and number of calls in queue, companies that instead start applying their efforts to customer-facing metrics like first-call resolution will find a fast turnaround in both their efficiency and the customer’s perception of the company.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi