It’s often said, “What gets measured gets done.” I believe that’s an oversimplification. The information produced in a typical contact center on any day could cover a small parking lot. Success is more a matter of creating insight and focus around the right levers—those areas that lead to effective services and great customer experiences.
Here’s the good news. There are key aspects of service delivery that drive contact center performance. Think of them as essential categories of metrics or properties every organization should be monitoring. They range from foundational to strategic and provide much-needed focus. As you ensure they get the attention they deserve, great results follow.
Let’s summarize them, identify the key supporting properties, and discuss how to effectively utilize these properties for your benefit.
Key Aspects of Service Delivery
The key aspects of service delivery build on each other. They range from the most basic (what’s the workload?) to the most strategic (what did you learn in handling that workload that can help the organization innovate?).
Workload
The first category is workload. The workload forecast should include all types of work your contact center will need to handle—all contact channels and any additional work types that perhaps haven’t yet made it into your forecasts. The essential supporting property is forecast accuracy.
Key property:
- Forecast accuracy
Resources
The next category is resources. If you have a good handle on the workload, you can build plans and schedules that enable the right people and supporting resources to be in the right places at the right times. A good supporting property is scheduled to actual staff.
Key property:
- Scheduled to actual staff
Accessibility
Accessibility, or how quickly customers can reach the help they need, is just an outcome—the result of forecasting the workload and matching it with the right resources. There are two key properties. Service level—expressed as X percent answer within Y seconds—applies to work that must be handled as it occurs (e.g., calls, text, chat). Response time—expressed as 100% response within N hours—is for work that can be deferred (e.g., customer email, processing).
Key properties:
- Service level
- Response time
Quality
Quality metrics assign a value to the quality of individual interactions. Criteria generally include interpreting customer requirements correctly, entering data accurately, capturing needed and useful information, and others. Data typically comes from samples via quality observations, recording contacts, and customer surveys. First contact resolution is an extension of quality—a tangible result of getting quality right.
Key properties:
- Quality
- First contact resolution (FCR)
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement strongly impacts customer experience and is essential to service delivery in any environment. Agent engagement almost always has a definable, positive correlation with retention, productivity, and quality. A quantifiable property that tracks employee engagement can come from employee surveys. You’ll also want to track turnover.
Key properties:
- Employee engagement
- Turnover
Customer Loyalty
The next key aspect of service delivery is customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is commonly measured through customer satisfaction (or CSAT, pronounced “see-sat”) scores or robust alternatives such as net promoter score (NPS), or customer effort score (CES). If you have the technology, you can use analytics tools that produce a score for customer sentiment.
Key property:
- CSAT, NPS, CES, or similar
Strategic Value
The most forward-thinking organizations approach service delivery as a means to capture and share insight that can improve products, services, and processes. What contributions can the contact center make to product innovation, user guides, customer communication, self-service systems, and other opportunities beyond the contact center? This cross-functional insight is strategic value, and measures are often focused on samples of impact in these areas.
Key property:
- Samples of strategic value
Bringing Key Aspects to Life
Between them, these ten properties support each of the key aspects of service delivery. Every organization needs them, yet in many cases, at least some vital metrics are missing or under-represented. So this is an area of opportunity to be among the best.
Here’s where things get exciting. Once you’ve established these basic categories and the key supporting properties, you can explore a world of metrics that add additional insight. For example:
- How does accessibility impact abandonment?
- Is there a correlation between service level and quality?
- What’s the relation between quality and employee engagement?
- How does customer satisfaction impact repeat business?
- How do strategic contributions correlate with workload trends?
You get the idea—there are dozens and dozens of interesting questions that could lead to valuable metrics and additional insight. As long as you stay anchored in the key aspects of service delivery, you can explore them to any breadth and depth that adds value.
Ultimately, it’s what you and your team do to make tangible improvements that matters most. As you bring these key aspects to life, you’ll identify opportunities to boost the consistency and quality of service, inspire and engage employees, and enable your organization to innovate. That’s exciting!
From the Brightmetrics Team: Optimizing Service Delivery in Your Contact Center
Brightmetrics™ is a leading UC and contact center analytics solution that helps you improve key aspects of service delivery in your contact center. Our powerful analytics address key aspects, such as managing accessibility, quality of your customer interactions, and agent engagement metrics. With our robust dashboard and reporting capabilities, you can optimize your contact center operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
By monitoring metrics like response time, service level, and transfer rate, Brightmetrics enables you to measure how easily customers can reach your contact center and receive prompt assistance, enhancing satisfaction and fostering loyalty. These performance metrics provide valuable insights for contact center managers to assess agent performance and satisfaction, leading to higher engagement and productivity.
Beyond monitoring metrics, Brightmetrics helps you uncover patterns, trends, and insights that enhance your understanding of customer behaviors and preferences. This valuable business intelligence drives customer engagement. With accurate and reliable information provided through comprehensive reports and analytics, you can make informed data-driven decisions. Identify opportunities for process optimization, resource allocation, and strategic improvements to drive operational efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and boost your bottom line.
Learn more about how Brightmetrics can help your business contact center by requesting a demo.
