Are Contact Center Metrics Becoming Passé?
According to research by The Harvard Business Review, the predictive power of CES is very strong. Among customers who reported low effort, 94 percent said they would repurchase, and 88 percent said they would increase their spending. Conversely, 81 percent of customers who exerted a lot of effort said they intended to spread negative word of mouth about the company.
“It’s one of the most important metrics you could—and should—be looking at,” Bhalla says.
And part of its appeal is that it can be used across channels, according to experts. “It truly covers the entire customer journey,” Jezierski says.
A big part of minimizing customer effort, obviously, is first-contact resolution (FCR). FCR is perhaps the most important driver of customer satisfaction. In a recent report, MetricNet noted that nine times out of 10, when customer satisfaction needs to improve, this can be achieved by increasing FCR.
FCR looks at the percentage of customer interactions completed within a single contact and gauges the ability of individual agents and the contact center as a whole to address customer issues in a single step.
“First-contact resolution is critically important,” EMS’s Staehlin points out. “It has a ripple effect on everything else you’re trying to do if you can’t serve the customer right the first time.”
Measuring FCR also gives a peek into employee engagement and employee satisfaction and can indicate whether agents have the tools and resources necessary to do their jobs effectively, Robbins maintains. “It looks at everything that goes into enabling a great customer outcome,” he says.
Experts recommend pairing FCR with several other customer-centric metrics, such as average resolution time, which measures the time that typically elapses between opening and closing a case; average number of replies per case, which measures the number of replies before customers’ issues are typically resolved; and the percentage of calls that have to be transferred or escalated.
Another critical metric is next-issue avoidance, which looks at how many customers have more than one issue resolved during a given interaction. This shows whether customer agents are thinking proactively and anticipating future questions that customers might have, thereby eliminating the need for them to come back to the contact center a few weeks later.
Customer service today must be about proactive outreach, Robbins adds.
“I like the idea of a propensity to contact—what is the likelihood that a customer will contact us and for what reason,” Robbins says.
Jezierski also advocates for metrics that turn contact centers into “listening posts.” Customer feedback, she says, “can be its own metric.”
“It’s about looking at complaints and aggregating all of them, categorizing them, and making changes to address the underlying issues,” she says.
Some of the newer metrics that could also fit under this context include the number of positive social mentions and the “rating response rate,” a metric that looks at the number of satisfaction surveys customers return compared to the number sent out. If only a handful of customers are returning surveys, it usually means they are ambivalent toward their service experiences. Often only really angry or really happy customers take the time to fill out surveys.
But because very few customers actually let companies know what’s on their minds, metrics have to fill in that information, today and into the future.
“Everything we look at today should tell us what enables great customer outcomes,” Robbins concludes. “Today we’re too busy trying to predict what our inbound volume will be. I don’t see enough organizations looking at the customer of tomorrow and what he will want.”
Senior News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.