Just as it’s wise to get an annual visit with your doctor, it’s also a good idea to schedule an annual checkup for your contact center to determine the wellness of your customers. When you’re busy with day-to-day, 24/7 operations, it can be difficult to identify issues that can remain under the radar until they become full-blown problems. By staying proactive with your customer care, you can sustain service levels while addressing potentially costly concerns.
What should you be reviewing? The following are areas that may help you gain clarity about what your customers truly think of your contact center and your brand.
Call Abandonment
One metric that speaks volumes about how your customers feel about your organization is your call abandonment rate. The percentage of customers who hang up before an agent takes the call is a key indicator of customer satisfaction. In general, if there is an abundance of abandoned calls that happen in the first 10 seconds, it could be a problem with a wrong number, IVR routing issues, or a hardware problem. However, calls that are abandoned at 30 seconds or beyond indicate that customers are not happy with the current wait time to speak with an agent.
Net Promoter Score
According to a recent survey of companies, 27 percent currently use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure agent performance. Yet, this metric can also be used to better understand customer satisfaction. First introduced in the Harvard Business Review in 2003, this score indicates the likelihood that a customer would recommend a company to a friend or colleague. In other words, it is vital to determining how many customers are assets and how many are liabilities.
Employee Engagement
Happy employees make satisfied customers. One of the best ways to determine how your employees feel about their work is to conduct interview and surveys.
Questions to ask:
- Do they feel they’re being fairly compensated and receiving the benefits they need?
- Is there a good work/life balance?
- What is their perception of their co-workers, subordinates, and managers?
- Do they believe they are getting the level of support, tools, and training they need to succeed?
- Do they consider there to be a clear career track for their future?
The answers will help you to determine how you can strengthen engagement to support a greater customer experience.
You’ll also want to evaluate employee churn rate. Job satisfaction is the most obvious reason for a high churn rate. Not only does turnover affect the level of service you can provide, it also increases recruitment and training costs and hinders productivity.
Active and Waiting Calls
This key performance indicator (KPI) measures the current volume compared to the number of callers waiting to speak with an agent. This is both a real-time metric that you can share with your agents to help them better understand their performance and a source of data to understand the quality of customer service being delivered.
Like with call abandonment rates, the number of active and waiting calls can help you understand what the customer is thinking. If numbers are indicating that you’re not achieving satisfactory service levels, it may be time to consider system improvements that can help create lower effort interactions without extended wait times.
Call Resolution
How well are calls being resolved? Delivering a high quality of service means resolving calls in a timely manner, with most being resolved on first contact. Low call resolution rates indicate more complex issues and greater customer dissatisfaction.
Interestingly, this metric is measured by less than 50 percent of contact centers. However, there are many insights to be gained by doing so. An increasingly low call resolution rate can signal several potential problems that impact customers:
- Agents may need more training
- There could be issues with system routing
- There are unresolved issues with products, shipping, or billing
Social Media Complaints
According to a recent Dimension Data survey of contact centers, social media is now the first channel of choice when Gen Y customers want service. The number of customers asking for help and lodging complaints via social media channels like Facebook and Twitter is growing rapidly. It’s no longer feasible for social media to be exclusively the domain of the marketing department when there is so much cross-over with customer service.
Social media requires ongoing support and provide a real-time indicator of customer sentiment. These channels also provide a rich source of analytics that can be reviewed on a regular basis to better understand trends and triggers for lapses in service levels.
Ongoing Preventive Care
Although no one likes going to the doctor for a checkup, there is always peace of mind that comes with getting a clean bill of health. Likewise, by conducting ongoing wellness checks for your customers, as well as on your contact service operations, you can gain the confidence that service levels are being maintained and your brand is being adequately supported.
