Contact centers are metrics-driven to track, analyze and respond to service and performance issues via customer transactions. Yet which metrics work best?
Sykes (News – Alert) has some insights it is sharing that are worth while to check out. It is a leading BPO firm with 30-plus years of experience and 80-plus contact centers with 51,000 employees in 24 countries, serving clients’ customers in 30 languages.
Michael Clarkin is vice president of marketing for Sykes Contact Center Services. He has an overview of how his customers approach measuring contact center transactions. As the service provider of many Fortune 500 companies, he says industry leaders trust his company to help build and sustain profitable customer relationships that last a lifetime.
“No doubt, without realizing it, you have talked to one of our employees when calling the customer service line of a major brand,” says Clarkin. “How do those brands make sure that we are providing the best in customer service to you and their other customers?
Sykes’ clients use a range of transaction indicators as their primary trending metrics, such as customer satisfaction, first call resolution, net promoter score and customer effort score.
Poor customer satisfaction in a transaction contributes to defection but is rarely just a bad agent experience. Customers are usually also angry with a policy or product. So these worst experiences are usually “exceptions”, issues that do not come from consistent problems or process designs, but from human error or unusual use-cases. As a result, fixing the root causes doesn’t have much CSAT impact, since the problems are not systemic.
First call resolution has too many exceptions to be a good predictor. Plenty of happy callers didn’t have their issue resolved on the first call, and plenty of unhappy callers did but were still angry about something else. FCR correlates to retention but is not always causal. For one client, the callers were well resolved (65 percent of the time) but the CSAT was low (in the 50 percent for top two boxes).
“Agent emphasis was on getting as many solvable issues solved, but as a result they were hanging on to calls that needed to be transferred back to the point of sale,” reports Clarkin. “We rephrased the objective as ‘Best Resolution Path’ rather than ‘First Call Resolution’ and focused on initial triage and routing before trying to solve.
Clarkin admits to being somewhat skeptical about the customer effort score metric; he would be looking for a measure of customer time wasted for comparison. He would be curious in Sykes’ next projects to see what theCES ( News – Alert) is predictive of, but from the analysis his company has done of listening to thousands of calls,” it still doesn’t fit with my intuition of what makes customers happy or not in a phone call transaction. “
Often Sykes hear callers that are more satisfied if the service representative [contact center agent] can take them comfortably and confidently to a final conclusion (not necessarily resolution). Discomfort starts to creep in if the agent fumbles the process, takes too long to find information, uses words that sound indecisive or projects a lack of confidence.
“No one metric is right for all of our clients, each of whom has different goals for their customer service centers,” says Clarkin. “Good experiences in a call are cumulative – one doesn’t make you loyal–but if you have reason to call your cellular carrier or bank every month, and it always goes well, then that builds ‘credit’ with the brand.” –Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor
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