Many operations leaders consider customer satisfaction (CSAT) the undisputed king of contact centre metrics. However, no metric is an island. Trends in other metrics will impact CSAT. Highlighting these offers insights into how to increase customer happiness.
Of course, many more than five contact centre metrics impact customer satisfaction. Examples include abandon rates, forecast accuracy, and agent proficiency. However, five of the most pertinent metrics that influence CSAT include:
1. Customer Effort
A highly regarded Harvard Business Review article, entitled: "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers", first underlined the significance of customer effort on CSAT and loyalty.
It reads: "When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily."
The report also suggests conventional wisdom that customers are more loyal to companies that go above and beyond is dubious. Its research instead indicates companies that "exceed customer expectations" create customers only marginally more loyal.
2. First Contact Resolution
According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, First Contact Resolution (FCR) "has an effect on almost every other meaningful statistic and measurement in the call center." As such, it states that FCR is the "home run" of all operational metrics.
So, while many will view the metric as an efficiency saver, as it allows contact centres to monitor and reduce repeat calls, it also has a significant impact on CX.
How? In a similar manner to customer effort. By managing and eliminating the need to call back, customers do not have to expend extra energy to resolve their problems.
3. Service Level
The longer customers wait to talk with contact centre agents, the more their frustration grows. Contact centres understand this, yet costs and recruitment issues prevent them from staffing to a level where an agent answers every contact within moments.
Service level helps contact centres find the balance between customer-pleasing wait times and cost efficiencies. Therefore, monitoring this metric and keeping wait time steady is crucial to maintain CSAT rates.
A study within Scientific Research Publishing confirms this, stating that service level has a "significant" role within CSAT. It also suggests that contact centres should: "Empower agents to give an informative satisfactory answer and top of the line service." Doing so may reduce the need for repeat calls that clog up call queues.
4. Quality Scores
Contact centres often conduct customer satisfaction research to determine agent behaviours that improve CX. Analysts then build these into quality scorecards.
As a result, when contact centres engage in quality monitoring, they measure the call from customers' perspectives. By doing so, operations can track trends in agent behaviours that directly influence CSAT.
5. Employee Engagement
Happy employees = happy customers. The saying is perhaps a little cliché, yet the evidence backs it up.
2017 Aberdeen Group research reports that companies with formal employee engagement plans have accomplished 39% annual growth revenue improvements from new customers.
Many business leaders also share its sentiment, with Richard Branson a high-profile example. As he infamously once said: "Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of employees, they will take care of the clients."
Building a Strategy for These Metrics
Bolstering CSAT requires an understanding of the factors that influence it. Therefore, many dashboards include the metrics above – and others – to showcase how contact centre performance affects critical customer outcomes.