Measure What The Customer Wants (Part 2 of 2)
By Jeremy Lee

In our last article, we discussed the various expectations a customer has from their product or service provider. As providers, we are aware that the customer expects to make gains and avoid pain whenever they purchase from us, they expect quality service and products, they want the best deals, they prefer personalized solutions and they insist on getting that product or service whenever and wherever they are and, last but not least they do not want to wait.

Unfortunately many organizations today still view the Inbound Contact Center as a cost center and every process and function in place should be lean to minimize cost. This, despite all the surveys and statistics that show it should be otherwise; it is cheaper to maintain an existing customer then to gain a new one. Yet organizations still see the marketing and sales division as their “hero” instead of placing equal weightage on both.

This need for the Contact Centre to be lean has transformed the performance metrics of an inbound contact center to be highly cost orientated. Examples of these are average handling time and productivity rates. There are not many other environments out there that these two measurements are so closely scrutinized. Imagine being told to resolve all calls within a 3-4 minute period regardless of the type of call and being scheduled in such a way that you speak to about 120 customers a day for about 6hours in and 8 hour work day.

From the perspective of the customer, do these measures really matter?
What do we, as customer really want whenever we interact with a contact center?

• We want our call to the Contact Center to be free.
• We want our calls to be answered every time, irregardless of the time or day.
• We do not want to wait for “hours” for our calls to be picked and to be placed on long holds or to be transferred endlessly.
• We expect professional and knowledgeable Contact Center Agents to handle our calls.
• We want our issues to be resolved quickly and effectively. We do not look forward to calling numerous times.
• If for some reason we need to wait for a resolution, we expect to be kept informed.
  
  

If that is what customers want, are we measuring them? "As what gets measured gets done?"

So what are some of the performance metrics we should measure from the perspective of customers? We should look into First Call Resolution, High Service Level, Percentage of Escalated Calls, Percentage of Calls Abandoned, Queue Time and Response Time not just only from the perspective of achieving a certain set percentage but also from the distribution of the graph over a period of time.

Other performance metrics we should concentrate on are High Call Monitoring Scores, High Product Knowledge Scores and Repeat Calls (the number of times the same customer calls on the same issue). When we really start measuring what customers expect from us, we will retain them.

Last updated - 31 July 2004