How well are your customers being served by your contact center service and support center? Are your employees delivering the best possible experience when customers engage with your business?
Knowing how well your customer support team is performing is essential for continuous improvement. It’s important to manage your team more efficiently, reducing costs, and increasing employee satisfaction, which in turn can impact sales and customer retention.
A report by PwC, Experience is Everything, found that customers are willing to spend as much as 16% more with companies that offer a great customer experience. Moreover, 63% are willing to share more personal information and opinions when a company provides a wonderful experience. On the flip side, 59% of consumers will stop doing business with a company after several bad experiences and 32% will walk away from a brand they favor after just one bad experience.
The potential for increased profits from exceptional customer support requires that you track how quickly your employees are resolving issues and addressing complaints. The first step to gathering baseline and ongoing performance data is to define key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you have this information, the next step is to constantly motivate employees to exceed performance goals.
Step 1: Define Customer Support KPIs
KPIs provide insight into how well employees are performing relative to company goals and department objectives. But how can you be sure that you are tracking the right metrics? After reviewing several sources on the “best” customer support KPIs, we have compiled a comprehensive list.
These are the KPIs that appear most often.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
FCR refers to the percentage of support tickets resolved on the first contact by a customer. This contact could be by phone, email, chat or social media interaction. It is calculated by dividing the number of issues resolved on the first contact by the total number of contacts with the contact center service support department. FCR measures the efficiency of the support team and how good they are at ensuring that customers do not have to call back about the same issue. It also indicates how good employees are at quickly navigating a knowledge base and addressing issues on their own without having to transfer a call or get help from a supervisor. FCR correlates to customer satisfaction so it is important that you know how effective your employees are and work to continuously optimize it.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
AHT is a metric for the average length of a transaction – from the time the call was initiated to the time it is resolved including hold time, talk time and after work time. It is an important metric for deciding staffing levels. When AHT is too long, it may indicate that the employee is having difficulty handling the request. If it is too short, the employee might be rushing through the call. Hastening a call without truly resolving the issue could result in customer dissatisfaction. Improving AHT should be defined as decreasing handle time while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction. AHT is calculated by adding talk time, hold time, and after work time, then dividing that sum by the total number of calls.
There are a number of things contact center management can do to improve AHT.
- Optimize call routing
- Build a knowledge base
- Streamline processes
- Improve employee training and coaching
- Monitor performance
- Implement gamification as a service software
Abandon Rate
No one likes to be put on hold or wait in a queue for a long time. When this happens, a customer is more likely to abandon the call before they speak with a contact center employee. Not only does this result in a lost opportunity, but it also leads to customer dissatisfaction and potentially lost revenue.
Abandon rate refers to the percentage of calls made into the customer support center where the customer hangs up before they ever talk to an employee. It is represented as a percentage and calculated by taking the number of calls abandoned divided by the total number of calls. Some companies exclude calls that are abandoned in under five seconds as these calls typically represent wrong numbers. One way to reduce the abandon rate is to institute a ring-back program giving customers the option to request a call back as an alternative to holding in a queue.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Ultimately, the goal of all contact center service support teams are satisfied customers. A satisfied customer might tell a friend or two, whereas a dissatisfied customer will tell the world.
CSAT measures customer sentiment about your support services. The CSAT score is most often based on the results of a post-call or post-issue resolution survey. You may simply ask “how satisfied are you with the services you just received?” You might ask the customer to rate the experience from 1 to 5, with 1 being the least satisfied and 5 being the most satisfied. Or you can get granular with your survey and ask questions about how well the employee treated the customer, how helpful or empathetic they were, how well the issue was resolved, and how the customer would rate the overall experience.
Service Level
Service level is a calculation of the support team’s capacity to meet the standards in your Service Level Agreement to your customer. The service level outlined in your agreement may state that all customers with support requests will be contacted back within 24 hours. Or you might guarantee that you will replace a product if the same issue occurs more than twice. Once you publish these commitments to your customer, it is essential that you deliver.
Save Rate
Customers can be fickle. The interaction you have with customers while resolving an issue could decide if they will remain loyal to your brand or jump ship. Loyalty is fundamental to business success. It costs much less to retain a customer than to get a new one. To many businesses, repeat customers are the holy grail.
The save rate is calculated by dividing the number of repeat customers by the total number of customers.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures the likelihood that a customer would recommend your business. It can be a helpful way to measure your support team’s performance.
Customers rate how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend or colleague based on a scale of 1-10. The higher the rating, the better. NPS responses from 0-6 represent the detractors. Ratings from 7-8 are categorized as passives. Ratings of 9-10 represent the promoters. To calculate the NPS score, take the % of promoters minus the % of detractors. Your CSAT survey answers can help you understand the areas that you need to improve.
Apple, considered to be a leader in customer loyalty, achieves an NPS score of 75-85%.
Step 2: Motivating Contact Center Service Employees to Constantly Do Better
Motivating employees to do well is not an easy task. Motivating them to always do better can be even more of a challenge. Enter gamification with Aspect League.
League’s gamification tools apply game mechanics to other areas of activity to motivate and engage contact center employees to continually improve by adding an element of fun to the work they do. This leads to greater employee satisfaction. When your team is happier, so are your customers. Gamification can be used during hiring and onboarding, continual performance monitoring, training, and coaching. It fosters positive and friendly competition among individuals as well as teams. With leaderboards, points, badges, contests, avatars and virtual currency, contact center employees can level up to achieve greater recognition and rewards to reach goals.
Choosing a Gamification Platform – On-Premises or Gamification as a Service (GaaS)?
Gamification solutions can be installed as traditional on-premises solutions or as a cloud-based gamification as a service model. Gamification as a service is appealing for contact centers for a number of reasons. This model enables businesses to purchase only the technology they need, reducing internal IT support requirements. It also offers more flexibility and scalability as operational needs change. With gamification as a service, the initial investment is low and users typically pay a monthly licensing and usage fee.
The biggest advantages of using gamification as a service with a cloud solution include financial flexibility, reduced reliance on IT, faster implementations, and system redundancy. Instead of focusing on maintaining equipment and systems, the organization can focus on continuous improvement and employee engagement, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
Gamification in customer service is not just about having fun. You can gamify the Top 7 support team KPIs to engage your team, make them more satisfied with their job, and motivate them to provide an exceptional customer experience.
Using game mechanics to motivate and engage contact center employees seamlessly aligns employee behaviors with company goals. Learn about contact center gamification solutions with Aspect League.
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