Putting the customer first
Contact centre metrics aren’t anything new, but during the last year it’s become more apparent that providing excellent customer care is now more crucial than ever.
It’s easy to neglect customer care metrics when there is so much to contend with both in our work and personal lives right now – but in fact this is exactly why it should be revisited. Your customers need to feel reassured when they interact with you, that you are doing everything you can to solve their issues, they don’t want another problem piled onto an already overflowing plate. As organisations continue to navigate through the current choppy waters and come up with strategies to future proof their operations, the metrics that are put in place to ensure your customers remain happy and loyal have never been more important.
By putting your customers’ interests first, this can be a time for your company’s brand to lead.
Source – Deloitte ‘Maintaining customer loyalty and trust during times of uncertainty’
Forging a stronger customer relationship
In its report ‘Adapting customer experience in the time of coronavirus’, McKinsey state that now is the time for customer experience leaders to position themselves at the forefront of the longer-term shifts in consumer behaviour that have resulted from this crisis. Keeping a real-time pulse on changing customer preferences and rapidly innovating to redesign journeys that matter to a very different context will be key. The contact centre metrics you have in place will undoubtedly help with this.
7 Contact Centre metrics to track to help keep your customers happy
1. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys will provide an insight into how customers perceive the quality of the service you offer. They let you know your customers’ needs and challenges, and how successful you are in meeting those needs. When conducting customer surveys, ask customers how their interactions with agents have been. Find out why they have or haven’t enjoyed your service. The data generated from this process will let you know where you might need to make some changes.
2. First Call Resolution
First call resolution (FCR) refers to your agents’ ability to resolve callers’ issues the first time they get in contact. FCR as a metric can be extremely relevant, as higher first call rates generally mean greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Average Response Time
If it takes your customers too long to reach an agent this can be highly problematic. If your call centre is unable to route calls to agents fast enough, customers may get frustrated and take their business elsewhere. If this problem persists, it could impact caller traffic into your centre and ultimately affect your bottom line.
4. Call Abandonment Rates
Call abandonment rate is the percentage of inbound calls in which the caller hangs up before they reach an agent. Call abandonment rates coincide with response times. The longer it takes to reach an agent, the higher the chance of the call being dropped. High call abandonment rates can equate to falling revenues and a declining customer base.
5. Overall Call Volumes
By measuring call volumes over time (weekly or monthly), call centres can detect patterns in the number of calls they receive. In response, they can assign personnel and resources to match peak demand periods.
6. Call Quality
Call quality measures the effectiveness of your agents’ conversations with customers. Calls are of high quality if they are courteous, considerate, and patient and solve the problems raised by the caller. They also leave the customer feeling more satisfied.
7. Contact Centre Agent Satisfaction
For most customers, direct engagement with your organisation will begin and end as interactions with your agents. You expect your staff to be professional all the time. But their performance will be affected by how satisfied they are working for you. You can measure your staff’s satisfaction levels by conducting regular surveys. Ask whether they are happy with their work environment, equipment and interpersonal interactions. Responses can be values on a scale so it’s easier to track changes in their demeanour over time.
Transform your customer engagement with an 8×8 contact centre solution
Although most contact centres we speak to understand that customer experience is key to their success, many don’t have the communications infrastructure in place to facilitate best-in-class customer interactions and robust monitoring of contact centre metrics.
With 8×8 Virtual Contact Centre from Opus, you can transform your customer engagement by having everything you need in one place. Our solution suite combines not just world-class contact centre capabilities but also workforce optimisation and analytics that will allow better contact centre metrics to be produced.
