The Ascent Group, Inc.

Improving the Customer Experience

An extract from Call Center Strategies 2010, a new research report published by the Ascent Group, Inc.

Companies in all industries are recognizing the strategic importance of customer satisfaction. A recent survey conducted by Maritz found that 43 percent of customers who stopped doing business with a company made their decision based on poor customer service. In the past, one disgruntled customer could easily tell a number of their friends and associates about a poor service experience. Now, with help of social media tools like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, one bad customer service experience can go viral within minutes.

Obviously, the customer service employee plays a critical role in customer service success. The customer service employee is the frontline, the point of contact, the face or voice of the company. How they feel about their job and their role in the company will be communicated through the level of service they are providing customers.

Customer service management’s top priority is attracting and engaging top-performing customer service employees. Assembling the right mix of resources to ensure high-quality, cost-effective customer care is a constantly evolving challenge. Selecting, training, managing, and motivating customer care employees requires creativity, enthusiasm, and perseverance.

Determining the right combination of technology and personal touch is also a moving target as customer needs and expectations evolve. Companies are now realizing the importance of aligning internal quality goals and measurements with the customer or end-user’s quality goals and expectations—measuring the “customer experience” rather than management’s interpretation of the customer experience. This approach is now being reflected in call quality monitoring and the coaching of agents. The same concept is also applied to the “virtual” rep—whether it’s the IVR or the web site. Appropriate deployment of customer-facing technology is a key determinant of customer satisfaction. Many companies that have hit the mark have found it’s even more challenging to stay on top.

With this in mind, the Ascent Group conducted its fourth annual call center benchmarking study to better understand how companies are managing inbound customer care. We asked companies to share their experiences to help us identify the practices that make or break a customer contact center. We also asked companies to provide performance benchmarks so we could identify “best performers”—companies providing the best service at the best cost. The results of this research are contained in our report, Call Center Strategies 2010. Research topics included:

• Call Center Benchmarking Comparisons by Industry
• First Call Resolution Performance
• Frontline Training Practices
• Supervisory Training
• Reward & Recognition Approaches
• Monitoring Call Quality
• IVR Performance

As part of this research, we asked companies to report call center operational data so we could calculate several performance benchmarks. The following benchmark metrics were collected and calculated:

• Cost — Cost per call (Operational & Maintenance costs only — direct labor, contractor costs, overtime, and non-labor O&M; no capital costs or overheads)
• Productivity — Calls Handled per FTE (per month)
• Service — % Abandoned Calls (total calls handled versus total calls offered)
• Service — % Call Resolved on First Contact (of total calls handled)
• Service — % Agent Availability (time on phone or available to take calls)
• Service — Service Level Conformance (percent of days service level goals achieved)
• Service — Average Speed of Answer (Time between the first ring heard by the caller and when the call is answered by an agent or automated system, including time spent in queue.)

We identified the “best performers” for each industry-—above average companies that deliver low cost, high productivity, and high service. We calculated a “best performer” average for these high performing companies.  We also calculated an industry average for each of the benchmark metrics, to demonstrate the performance of participants by industry. The following two charts depicts the Unit Cost and Abandonment Rate for our study group.

More benchmark performance comparisons are contained in the published research report.

What Did We Learn?

“Best Performing” contact centers are more likely to:

• Use behavioral-based screening to select the best candidates,
• Empower employees to make decisions,
• Actively reward and praise employees for superior performance,
• Commit resources to consistently monitor call quality and provide feedback,
• Offer periodic refresher training,
• Actively measure and monitor performance, and
• Use performance results to drive continual improvement.

Focus on the Customer Experience.

Find out what your customers expect from your company and your employees. Conduct regular customer research to understand expectations and measure customer satisfaction routinely, and if possible, tie customer satisfaction feedback to individual employees. This will hold your front-line employees accountable for their service delivery. Measure customer satisfaction with your services and service delivery. Seventy-seven percent of our panel routinely measures customer satisfaction. Companies that do not measure customer satisfaction and customer expectations are missing out on business-essential feedback.

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