In the contact center, efficiency is everything. Customers are always in need of support, and there’s a constant flow of inquiries to be answered. Outstanding customer experience (CX) starts with the most important aspect of a contact center: human agents.
Agents are the heart of any good CX strategy. Engaged, empathetic, and efficient agents are the difference between substandard and first class CX.
But achieving great CX is hard when you don’t know what your customers want.
How can businesses maintain a good overview of customer perceptions while balancing agent needs?
The answer lies in CX metrics. Metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure performance or processes for specific activities within the contact center.
No matter your industry, data-driven insights are essential to delivering the outstanding CX your customers expect.
With CX for consumers reaching an all-time low, declining for a third year in a row, is it time for businesses to re-evaluate the metrics they use to define CX success?
Direct or Indirect Metrics?
There are two different types of CX metrics: direct and indirect.
Direct metrics are derived from asking the customers questions, usually through a survey. Indirect metrics, on the other hand, draw on data collected automatically, without the need to ask any questions.
Both types of metrics have their advantages, and combining them will grant better visibility over CX, employee experience, and the overall customer journey.
This array of acronyms can be overwhelming: and knowing exactly which KPIs to monitor will depend on the needs of your contact center. New CX metrics are constantly being deployed to shed light on the mind of the consumer.
Engaged, empathetic, and efficient agents are the difference between substandard and first class CX...
But which metrics, both direct and indirect, are the most impactful to monitor for your business?
Here are four key metrics that you can use to start monitoring your contact center more effectively.
Direct Metric 1: Net Promoter Score (NPS)
All organizations need to know not just the experiences of their customers but most critically whether they will act on it, over and beyond future purchases that may be impacted by other factors, like need and product or service availability.
The net promoter score (NPS) measures this attitude. It is calculated after asking customers one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our business/service to family, friends, or colleagues?”
Customers give a score from 0, meaning “not at all likely,” to 10, meaning “extremely likely,” with scores of 9 or 10 denoting that customer as a “promoter,” while scores of 0-6 indicate a “detractor.” The detractor scores are subtracted from the promoter scores to calculate the final NPS.
Two decades after its inception in the Harvard Business Review, NPS offers a brief, easily dissected overview of customer attitudes, prompting a more general reflection rather than based only on their most recent experience.
In addition, NPS divides your customers into “promoters” and “detractors,” allowing for targeted outreach to those groups depending on the score they gave.
However, the NPS sometimes overlooks the nuances of CX. For example, NPS fails to provide specific CX insights, leading to a move by CX leaders away from the metric. For such reasons it is likely that organizations will start to phase out NPS in favor of metrics which measure future CX methodologies.
Direct Metric 2: Customer Effort Score (CES)
For actionable CX insights, you need a metric that focuses on the customer journey. Customer effort score (CES) measures the ease with which customers interact with your business: by asking about the effort expended to reach a solution. The lower the CES, the easier it was for your customer to resolve their query, and the more effective your CX.
As noted earlier, CES addresses one of the most important aspects of CX: the overall customer journey.
Customers who had to put in a lot of time and effort into their interactions will understandably speak negatively about your business to others.
In common also with NPS, the impact of customers’ negative experiences is amplified when they use social media to express their displeasure. It is therefore important to address any CES issues holistically and identify any gaps between channels.
The best CES scores usually stem from well-designed omnichannel journeys that utilize intelligent automation. When the customer is able to use the channel of their choice to contact you, at a time convenient to them, effort is reduced and customer satisfaction soars.
In a similar way to NPS, this metric also fails to provide in-depth feedback on the customer journey. You can tell when your CX is lacking, but not the reasons behind it.
A New Kind of Metric?
Metrics can only work as well as the procedures they inform. Looking at the data from a statistical point of view can mean you lose sight of the bigger CX picture.
Instead of focusing on the granular data regarding individual customer interactions, it might be time to look at the overall view of your contact center and focus on reducing the overall volume of contact, as well as the CX metrics.
For example, Internet of Things (IOT) are internet-connected devices that act on behalf of consumers and organizations to provide key insights without the need for human intervention. Gartner has estimated that IOT devices will have the potential to behave as customers by 2026, equating to one in five customer interactions.
Digital customers, enabled by IOT devices, pose new challenges to delivering customer experiences. But they also present new opportunities for revenue generation by allowing businesses to leverage data from a much broader range of sources than previously available.
Proactive strategies can also automate customer engagement and support, reducing call volumes and enabling team members to focus more of their attention on complex challenges.
This means that, as well as focusing on great experiences for your customers, you need to focus on their devices and on digital customers.
To measure their effectiveness, it is crucial that you are able to understand their data. The rise of IOT devices necessitates a shift towards more dynamic data management solutions, aggregating data across all touchpoints, and thereby enabling proactive and tailored customer interactions.
Cutting Out the Middleperson: Indirect Metrics
In the end, direct metrics are fallible. The customer’s memory is often inaccurate, and recollections of their total experience with your business can be undermined by a single poor one.
Consumers will reduce spending, or cease spending altogether, following just one bad experience. Any attempt to ask more questions, and gain a better picture of the customer, is often punished by plummeting response rates.
For truly accurate CX measurement, you need to cut out human error. With powerful recording and transcription technologies, backed by intelligent automation, this has never been easier.
Indirect metrics, that is, forms of measurement that can be conducted passively, without directly consulting the customers, can give CX leaders a 360-degree view of customer perceptions without the bias that emotions can introduce.
Indirect Metric 1: Average Handle Time (AHT)
Making the best use of an agent’s limited time is one of the biggest challenges when trying to build an efficient contact center.
Average handle time (AHT) is calculated as the total length of an interaction, regardless of channel, including time on hold and any after-call work time, divided by the total number of calls. Usually, after-call work is the hidden obstacle that inflates AHT, and improving this metric is a great way to address overall efficiencies in the contact center.
However, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) web chat and self-service channels reducing the levels of simpler customer enquiries, this metric may not be as relevant as it used to be.
Agents handling more complex customer inquiries will see higher average times. AHT doesn’t differentiate between short queries, which could be dealt with in the IVR, versus complex queries that were solved relatively quickly.
When paired with wrap codes, AHT can identify simple queries that take an above-average amount of time to resolve, which can inform agent feedback and training.
Making the best use of an agent’s limited time is one of the biggest challenges when trying to build an efficient contact center.
That said, brief interactions are not always ideal. Low AHT can also indicate a failure to adequately address customer concerns, so it is also important to look at first call resolution (FCR) rates. FCR measures the percentage of queries resolved on the first contact attempt, suggesting an efficient contact center that streamlines customer journeys.
Indirect Metric 2: IVR Containment
IVR containment is calculated as the percentage of total calls that don’t get routed to an agent. With increasing hype around AI, there is an upward movement on trying to contain calls within the IVR to reduce total levels of contact.
Usually, customers are routed through an IVR using dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones, selecting the answers by using the keypads on their phones, or with natural language processing (NLP), which can identify customer reasons for calling.
Both of these methods route customers to the most appropriate next steps to answer the customers’ problems directly (such as finding their bank balance). Or direct them to another channel such as a self-service channel, AI web chat, or an agent, depending on the type of inquiry.
A high percentage of IVR containment means that the majority of customer inquiries don’t require an agent to solve. However, this could also suggest high abandonment levels due to frustrated customers prematurely disconnecting their calls or abandoning their web chats.
This is why it is important to view customer journeys holistically and investigate fluctuations in IVR containment levels based on different customer groups.
Keeping Up With the KPIs
Indirect metrics, though precise, can never truly replace direct customer contact. Not only can a direct survey draw out insights not obvious in automatic processing, but it also serves to build a relationship with the customer, deepening their investment in your business long-term.
As we have seen in this article, both direct and indirect CX metrics have pros and cons. Is it time to ditch the “traditional” metrics altogether? New technologies, including NLP, AI-backed transcription, and sentiment analysis, offer the potential to extract meaningful feedback from every customer interaction, without the risk of survey fatigue.
Transcribed interactions with customers, whether through voice or digital channels, can be analyzed for sentiment to gather the overall tone of the interaction, as well as quality management and industry-specific compliance regulations. This gives contact centers the best of both worlds: data from every customer interaction, not just the customers who fill out the surveys.