Are Contact Center Metrics Becoming Passé?
THROW A NET OVER NET PROMOTER
Net Promoter Score (NPS), which gauges how likely customers are to recommend a company and its products or services to others, is a metric used by roughly two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 companies and 30 percent of firms overall. It has been largely criticized since it was introduced by Fred Reichheld in 2003, and is being de-emphasized now by many experts as well.
Omer Minkara, a research director at Aberdeen Group, points out that NPS “is ultimately a representation of customer sentiment at the time” and “doesn’t truly represent behavior, such as client referrals.”
Aberdeen’s research found that only about 20 percent of customers who are identified as promoters by NPS actually advocate for a given brand.
Minkara, therefore, warns against “assuming that it also provides directional insights into organizational success in driving brand awareness or word of mouth.”
That doesn’t mean, though, that NPS is a useless metric. It has plenty of merit, according to Wes Hayden, CEO of Virtual Hold Technology. Using NPS, companies can gain insights into why certain customers are detractors and devise strategies to turn those liabilities into assets, he says.
While companies can still use NPS as an effective metric, Minkara says it shouldn’t be used alone. Instead, NPS should be combined with other metrics, he says, such as the number of positive social media mentions.
ABANDONING CALL ABANDONMENT
Another metric that is losing steam in the contact center is call abandonment, which tracks the percentage of calls made to the contact center where the customer hangs up before speaking to an agent. This information might seem important, especially given that one in five calls to businesses on mobile phones is abandoned, according to a Marchex study analyzing mobile click-to-call performance.
But call abandonment is also one of the least effective metrics, according to Robbins.
“It doesn’t tell you why the customer abandoned the call,” he says. And without looking at the causes, you can’t find a solution that will work for the business or its customers.
Abandonment could indicate dissatisfaction with the wait time, but it could also result from a caller dialing the wrong number, IVR routing issues, annoying on-hold music, hold messages that do not set good expectations, or hardware problems. Or perhaps the caller decided to try another channel or to call back at a less busy time, both of which would bode well for the contact center. If the IVR provides self-service, abandonment could simply mean that the caller found what he needed and didn’t need to go further—another positive outcome.
Call abandonment also doesn’t typically look at calls that have been transferred to an agent, but those calls can be very revealing as well. If the agent is unable to resolve the caller’s issue or takes too long to do so, caller frustration could lead to hang-ups at this stage. It’s also common for callers to be put on hold or transferred and left in limbo for so long that they hang up.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
So if AHT, NPS, and call abandonment rates are out, what should replace them?
Experts largely agree with the customer-centric approach to metrics, and so customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is obviously the most important. In a contact center context, customer satisfaction can tell you just how happy customers were with the whole process, from finding out how to contact the company, to the actual conversation, to resolution and any follow-up. It could also help identify pain points to see which aspects of your support could be improved.
When it comes to customer service, a surefire way to create loyal customers is to help them resolve their issues quickly and easily. This thinking has given rise to a new metric, the customer effort score (CES), which was introduced by CEB in 2010. At its most basic level, CES seeks to answer one question: How much effort did you have to put forth to solve your problem or find an answer to your question? It is scored on a scale from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).
Some of the leading contributors to high customer effort include having to contact the company more than once (or be transferred) to get an issue resolved, having to repeat information over and over again, and having to switch between channels, like needing to call after being unable to solve a problem through Web self-service.