Are You Measuring Your Contact Center Performance Or What Really Matters For Your Business?

What are the measures used to define success in your customer service processes? It doesn’t matter if you have an internal customer service team or you work with a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner to manage this for you, what is it that you actually measure?

Many customer service managers will talk about Average Handle Time (AHT) or First Contact Resolution (FCR) - or other similar metrics. These all look good when displayed on a chart next to a green traffic light, but are they still the right way to measure if your customer service is really working?

FCR confirms that you could help the customer to fix their problem on their first call. AHT is the time taken on a call - did you take two minutes or thirty-two to fix the problem?

Clearly these are useful measures to understand how well a contact center is performing, but are they really what an executive is looking to measure when they are planning how to improve the customer experience? Are you measuring how your contact center is performing or how your customer feels?

Think about what really matters. Why are you spending time, effort, and budget on your customer service processes anyway? What is the real end goal? Let’s see if any of these ideas resonate:

• Customer satisfaction: does the customer leave an experience with your company feeling that they have been both heard and helped?
• Customer loyalty: Does your customer service encourage customers to remain loyal to your brand?
• Customer advocacy: Do customers promote and recommend your company to their friends and family because of your service?
• General revenue: is revenue increasing during a period where you are investing in improving customer service?
• Sales conversion revenue: can you take specific actions during customer interactions to increase sales - such as ensuring that support agents know the product range and can recommend upgrades or other products?
• Customer churn: especially valuable for subscription businesses relying on a monthly payment - does better service reduce customer churn?
• Brand value: does better service create a general boost in how people - such as the media - see your brand?
• Customer complaints: are customer complaints reduced? Also, when complaints are managed are they turned around, so a complaint becomes a satisfied customer?
• Company culture: does your culture of service make your brand an attractive place to work so you are attracting great people in addition to more customers?

This is just a short list of ideas in no specific order, but think just for a moment about those metrics. Are you measuring AHT and FCR, not customer advocacy? Why is that?

If you contract with a traditional BPO then they will almost certainly talk about contact center metrics. They measure the inputs required for a customer service solution - the cost of the agents, the cost of the contact center, the cost of the technology. Stir all these inputs into the mix and add a profit margin on top then give the client a report based on how well the contact center is answering calls.

Usually they will take this overall figure of how much the service costs and divide it across the number of agents in the contact center to create a Full-Time Equivalent rate - meaning the cost per agent to supply this service. You want another 100 agents because business is getting busy then you need to pay 100 x the FTE rate.

This is how BPO and customer service outsourcing has always been managed.

But what if you could start thinking in more detail about what really matters? Are you trying to reduce costs or increase revenue? Are you focused more on increasing customer advocacy or loyalty?

What if your customer service partner took these measures seriously and charged fees based on customer interactions, rather than FTEs? What if your customer service processes were priced based on the delivery of great customer service and the planned for outcomes were your strategic objectives, rather than just measurements of how well a contact center is performing?

This is exactly what yoummday offers. A highly skilled and flexible team that can scale as your business needs and is chargeable only when customers are helped. Instead of worrying about contact center metrics, our clients focus on what really matters to their business.