You may think your contact center team delivers a great customer experience, but does your data support this notion? Each contact center has its own programs, with goals and objectives set by the management, client, or other key stakeholders. While there are several agreed key contact center metrics you need for a balanced perspective (i.e. customer satisfaction, first contact resolution, agent satisfaction… etc.) there are two metrics that are within your span of control to effect immediate outcomes.
These metrics are consistently important to determine the ability of your contact center to achieve targeted goals and, ultimately, the customer experience objectives your team is trying to accomplish. The metrics we’d choose today if you asked us to help contact center managers understand their current customer experience and agent performance, as well as what opportunities and adjustments they could initiate to optimize the balance of these tenets are:
1. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
This metric refers to the time it takes for calls to be answered from the instant a customer is placed in a queue to the moment the customer service agent answers the call. We’d like to get a little more specific with this metric and call it Targeted Average Speed of Answer (TASA) moving forward.
TASA is a part of the service level agreement (SLA) determined by your client or by your management. Regardless of whether your contact center agents are on an outsourced program for a separate client or an in-house contact center, there are consequences for not meeting your predetermined TASA. In the case of an outsourced contact center, there is likely a financial fine associated with being outside of your TASA within certain parameters. For example, many organizations use the 80/20 model: 80% of calls have to be answered within the first 20 seconds, or they are subject to paying a fine.
However, even in the case that your contact center is internal, there are still ramifications for being outside of your TASA. Obviously the longer a customer has to wait before their call is answered, the more chance you have that they are going to abandon the call. And even if that customer stays on the line, a long wait is not a good customer experience.
The inability to maintain your target can provide insights into your business operations, including your staffing level, team training, and even the TASA itself. This is a metric that will provide major clues into the business decisions your organization makes on a daily basis.
2. Abandon Rate
This metric measures how many callers disconnect or hang up from a contact center before they can speak to a customer service agent. While it is typically true that with every abandoned call, your team is missing the opportunity to interact with that customer, again we need to dig a little deeper past a seemingly obvious answer. Whether it’s providing service, making a sale, or creating the desired experience, it is vital to take advantage of every opportunity to make contact with your customer.
Abandon rate is very important—it has a huge amount of impact on how your customers view your organization. And what’s more, the abandon rate is another metric that can give you insight into how your contact center is executing operations. It can give you clues about how many agents you need on staff at one time, how your phone system is configured, whether or not customers are being routed and transferred so much that they are hanging up, or whether your agents are trained appropriately and can handle the calls that they are receiving.
The reality is that this is a tricky metric to get right. In fact, a lot of businesses think their abandonment rate should be at 0. That’s actually not the case at all. To have an abandonment rate that low, you are looking at a huge staffing expenditure without the return on investment in terms of sales and customer satisfaction. Ultimately, the abandon rate is a very important metric to monitor and can give you the insight you need to make better business decisions in balancing your investments of resources, time, and money towards business outcomes in your operation.
Tools for Success
For many organizations, the contact center is the hub of their business, making it essential to maintain running smoothly and efficiently. Much of your contact center’s ability to deliver a great and memorable customer experience is dependent on using the right technology, measuring and analyzing data, hiring and training the right people, and adapting quickly to your customer’s needs. Brightmetrics can provide the analytics and reporting capabilities your contact center needs to expertly identify and monitor your most important contact center metrics, including the two we focused on in this article.
If you’d like to explore Brightmetrics for either your Mitel or Genesys Cloud contact center platform, please reach out to our team.