What is a contact centre?
Contact centers are caterers to providing customer support in multiple channels for companies and brands. Customers have come to expect the brands/companies they engage with on various platforms to offer customer support.
Contact centers distribute calls efficiently to increase customer satisfaction. They do this using an Interactive Voice Process that boosts first call resolution by directing the call to the most competent agent.
Managers at contact centers can access their team members’ priorities and objectives in real-time to work as a team. The system and construct of a contact center are flexible when required and allows tight security, and adapts to fluctuating calls and objectives.
Cloud-based software converts customer queries into tickets to resolve them in one place.
- Prioritizes, categorizes, and assigns tickets
- Issue resolution through team huddle, shared ownership, and parent-child ticketing
- Chat-bots
- Increases team productivity
- Unifies communication on all the channels for leveraging support
- Customizable workflows
- Key features available at higher prices
How contact metrics are customer experience metrics:
1. Average Handle Time:
It is the sum of the time that a customer uses to resolve customer support through emails/calls/social media. Includes the talk time, hold time, and instructions that follow the transaction.
Contact center metrics can immediately show a customer experience problem if the average time handle is too short or too long. When the handling time is too short, it shows that customer representatives are rushing through instructions. Too long indicates an agent who is not fluent with the tools and necessary solutions required to support the customer.
Companies have balanced Average Handle Time to provide an excellent customer experience when they use modern techniques to train their employees. Well-equipped and trained customer representatives are efficient as they can provide customers with clear and thorough solutions.
2. Customer experience quality:
There is a quality checklist in a contact center that customer representatives have to follow when they interact with a customer. The quality checklist or process includes a customer satisfaction form, from which auditors can determine whether the customer had a good experience. It represents the true perspective a customer has towards the customer support they have received. The quality process also addresses the fact that there might be a policy or product issue that needs to be fixed if the customer representative did everything right.
Comparing quality scores and satisfaction scores can detect what needs to be improved. Nowadays, contact centers have understood that they should track behaviors that align with an excellent customer experience and accelerate customer support representatives’ development and training. Contact centers also acknowledge that metrics need to be viewed through the customer experience metrics.
3. The level of service/response time:
It is a metric that shows the company’s commitment level to its customers by responding to queries and problems in a certain amount of time. To ensure that the customer experience is satisfactory according to response time, it is mandatory to train and equip customer support reps to be more efficient and reduce the number of issues. Another way to improve service level is by emphasizing doing whatever you can to solve a customer’s issues on the first contact.
Encouraging self-help opportunities can decrease the need for customers to contact support. Through contact center metrics, we can see that customer experience can be improved not only by restaffing but also by adding opportunities like self-help, improving the wait experience, and even improving customer support representatives’ efficiency by adding tools that they can use.
4. Reporting real-time:
Contact centers are driven by data collected from key performance indicators. They monitor customer support representatives and customer satisfaction levels on all platforms. This provides insight into what the customer experience is really like.
5. Keep customer support representatives happy:
Agent attrition is directly responsible for poor performances. Balancing out an employee’s life and work time will reduce inefficiency. Customer support representatives need to be addressed as human beings and not machines that can improve their skills.
A contact center’s employees will give you a whole new perspective on what they think could improve the customer experience. Listen to your agents. In today’s age, modern contact centers deal with agent attrition by developing and engaging their employees, taking their perspectives seriously, and making improvements consistently.
In conclusion, contact center metrics have an overview of how to deal with customers and deliver and provide excellent customer service training. They are a metric to calculate the level of customer experience with a company/brand.
