Rethinking Customer Engagement & Contact Center KPIs

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."        

Contact Centers are definitely one of the most complex operational environments to run and steer, due to the fact that contact centers operate using many complex systems & applications. And with the evolution of contact centers from transactional operations and costs centers to value generation engagement centers, the focus of performance management and steering has evolved as well.

While the contact center industry has been evolving, many contact center operations are still using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that have been designed & used since the 1990s and 2000s. Some of these KPIs are still useful to date, yet a critical look into what actually needs to be measured is crucial to understand the overall performance form an engagement and experience perspective.

From the "Time Era" to the "Engagement & Experience Era"

As I've pointed out in many of my previous articles, the contact center industry is evolving, and the move to 'Value-Generating Engagement Hubs' is already taking place. With that evolution, the way we measure contact center performance should change as well.

While costs play a very big factor in any organization, and traditionally contact centers have been more focused on measuring time than anything else, the shift to Engagement and Experience based performance measurement should be applied, and the way we look at the 'Time-Based KPIs' should change.

What I mean by this is that contact centers need to start with the customer when we design and analyze KPIs. Sounds Cliché, right? But it is true, measuring KPIs shouldn't be benefiting the organization before the customer. And the focus should be how can I measure the overall Experience I provide to my customer, how far is my engagement with my customer resulting to a value, how much effort is the customer putting into resolving a problem. The standard contact centers KPIs (such as number of calls answered or the traditional calls answered within a timeframe) no longer provide a comprehensive overview on the actual performance of a contact center.

The industry evolution is taking cutting-edge & forward thinking contact centers away from cost-based performance-based KPIs that focus mostly on agent performance & time management, and getting them closer to KPIs that can quantify both customer experience and engagement. And as customers' behavior and needs change, so do the KPIs.

So what are the important KPIs to consider? Here are some that I believe should be part of any Customer Engagement & Contact Center KPI dashboard, as well as management KPIs:

First Contact Resolution (FCR)

When you call or chat with a customer services representative, you always expect your issue to be resolved and answered during that conversation. And when that agent tells you they need to get back to you with their answer, as a customer, you feel this sense of disappointment, don't you? As a customer, we expect our issues to be answered and resolved quickly and with the least effort possible. This has a direct correlation with customer satisfaction, the faster a problem is resolved, the higher the customer satisfaction is.

In a way, both customers and organizations benefit from resolving calls during the first interaction, neither the organization has to spend extra time and resources to resolve an issue, nor does the customer need to wait for the resolution. So FCR can result in some cost savings.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Back in 2008, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) introduced Customer Effort Score for the first time. CEB’s research demonstrated that a reduction in customer friction is a better predictor of customer loyalty than one exceptional experience at a single touchpoint. In fact, CEB found that 81% of customers going through a high level of effort are likely to share their bad experience with friends versus only 1% of those who went through an effortless experience.

A study that was done by Harvard Business Review (HBR) back in 2010, sampled?75,000 consumers and revealed a far greater correlation between low Customer Effort Score and future customer value than either Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score.

In a nutshell, making it easier for customers is a better route to?profitability than trying to delight customers, or exceed their expectations.

Transactional Customer Rating

Relational Customer Rating is when organizations seek to gather customer ratings in respect to how customers feel about their relationship with the brand. While this rating provides a generic overview of how you perform as a brand, it doesn't provide deeper insight on how your contact center is performing, hence the need to have Transactional Customer Rating arises.

To obtain an instant feedback on the performance of the agent handling a certain interaction, as well as the customer's feedback on that particular interaction, the use of Transactional Customer Rating will be of a great benefit. And in case of a negative feedback, that agent can reopen the case to find more optimal solution for the customer.

KPIs that should never be correlated with Customer Experience

There are many KPIs within the customer engagement & contact center industry that we still measure that don't have an impact on overall customer satisfaction, this includes the following:

• Average Handling time (AHT), one of the KPIs that I personally believe can even have a negative impact on customer satisfaction if not managed correctly. As it results to agents spending less time with customers during the interaction to ensure meeting the AHT targets. AHT can be beneficial for workforce optimization & understanding which type of interaction consumes more time.
• Service Level , where we measure amount of calls answered within a certain time frame of seconds. This is a good KPI to be used internally to measure contact center performance, but it should only be used for that reason and that reason alone.

Rethinking Customer Engagement & Contact Center KPIs

As a contact center leader, ask yourself these questions:

1. How long does it take for a customer to get an resolution?
2. What do customers think about every interaction they have with the contact center?
3. How many customers had their issues resolved during the first interaction?

It is time to rethink how customer engagement & contact center KPIs are measured, and their correlation to customer satisfaction, loyalty and experience. Link your KPIs to customer experience and its business value, and the rest of the traditional KPIs can still be used to measure internal performance against costs, but never correlate them to customer satisfaction, loyalty or experience.

I think Peter Drucker, the father of Management summarized it the best when he was talking about customer perception of quality of services and products, he said "Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it."