Which Sales and Service KPIs Should We Measure in the Golden Age of the Customer?
Metrics, metrics, metrics! Businesses today firmly believe that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. But for some contact centers, what to manage and what to measure are giant question marks.
In a recent webinar I hosted on “What to measure in customer service,” Forrester Research analyst Art Schoeller talked about what is the right strategy, the right approach to building out a hierarchy of metrics for managing our customer service contact center operations. Below is a glimpse at some of the subject matter we covered.
Art explains that we are in “the golden age of the customer,” which is marked by patrons holding the majority of power on how companies do business. If companies can not meet the demands of the customer and deliver a satisfying experience, customers can easily turn to competitors or alternatives to satisfy their needs.
The contact center echoes this customer focused power shift and businesses are now looking more closely at how workflow and interactions impact the bottom line. Patrons want their customer experience to be pain-free, proactive, personalized and productive; they want a frictionless journey across touch points when deciding, investigating, purchasing and servicing.
The best way for customer service contact center operations to create and maintain superior customer experiences is to analyze customer data and measure successes and failures.
There is, however, a significant challenge … customers generate a lot of data. In fact, there are so many potential metrics and measurements for the contact center, we’d probably go crazy trying to navigate them all.
The key is to identify the right metrics for your particular business and deliver those metrics to team members who will find them the most valuable.
For instance, if your aim is to improve customer satisfaction and retention, you may choose to look at a cross metric of how long agents engage with a customer along with whether they appropriately satisfy requests. Agents may analyze these metrics as part of self-improvement training, or executives may decide use the metrics to determine whether agents have the proper access to resources to satisfy requests in a timely manner.
Art suggests creating a hierarchy and aligning each metric with a strategy.
Overall, for metrics to be valuable they must be understood, useful, consistent and statistically valid. But they must also be within the control of the company or agent and promote correct behavior. After all, what’s the point of looking at data if you can’t do anything with it? Even worse, what’s the point of looking at data if it encourages your employees to make bad decisions?!
Interested in some more insights? Good news! We recorded the entire webinar for your viewing pleasure! Tune in and learn how the history of business has evolved to the customer centric model, how companies are working to uncover the “metrics of truth” for their contact center and how NewVoiceMedia is providing tools to give companies better customer vision.
