Communication is fundamental to customer service. And as keeping customers happy is key to driving sales and securing repeat business, you can say that how you communicate with customers is essential to your overall business performance.
In that case, customer communication is something you really want to have a handle on - what you are doing well, what could be improved, where you could gain that all important extra few percentage points in efficiency and productivity. Thankfully, nowadays there are plenty of powerful call reporting and analytics software platforms which will plug into your contact centre and do just that.
The question is, what exactly do you measure? All of the leading analytics solutions from the likes of Oak, Tollring, RingCentral, Broadsoft, 8x8 and NEC are highly customisable and allow you to configure a huge, sometimes bewildering, range of performance metrics. So given all of this choice, how do you narrow it down into something manageable?
Here are the four key performance areas every contact centre wants to get a grasp on, and the best metrics within each for gathering actionable intelligence.
Cost
Ultimately, everything in business comes down to the bottom line, and you need to be able to monitor costs in order to be able to control them. Your contact centre defeats its purpose if it costs more to run than the ROI it generates from customer service. The obvious metric to measure here is cost per call, but call analytics software can also be configured to report on factors such as agent absenteeism and turnover. These might be more to do with HR than communications, but they add significant costs to contact centres all the same.
Service Quality
This really gets to the heart of what customer service is all about, and your KPIs in this area are essentially all about how good an experience your customers are getting. The base metric here is to set an Call SLA, a measure of what percentage of calls are being answered in a fixed amount of time. This can obviously be adjusted as required to drive service improvements. From there, add metrics such as Average Wait Time, Abandonment Rates and First Call Resolution, which give you a more in depth picture of how long customers are having to wait to get through, how many give up and how many get their queries dealt with successfully first time of asking.
