Contact centers are well known for high turnover. In fact, they face the highest turnover rates of any department within an organization – a whopping 30-45% average. Overall agent job satisfaction is lacking across the industry and ultimately, impacts their ability to deliver on customer experience.
A high turnover leads to numerous customer service challenges including a lack of consistency in agent knowledge and training levels in addition to staffing shortages that can lead to long wait times for customers. Needless to say, when employees are not set up for success, it is all the more challenging for them to provide the best service.
At a time when customer expectations are at an all-time high, and faced with an economic downturn, building employee morale can be your most powerful foundational approach.
As contact center leaders deploy new and better tools to help increase efficiency and reduce costs, putting customer and employee relationships center stage can be a driving force for improving business outcomes. Employee experience (EX) has quickly become as important to CX, the customer experience itself.
A contact center with high turnover is constantly stuck in the cycle of recruiting, hiring, and training new agents. Yet recruiting agents has become more complex as more organizations switch to remote models: there are more opportunities for agents and companies are competing for top talent. This means recruiters have to adopt new strategies to attract agents while keeping retention top of mind so that they are more inclined to stay.
Finding ideal candidates is only a part of the battle. The next big challenge is keeping them engaged.
Contact center agent retention is critical to achieving strong operational advantages and customer satisfaction. The key to reducing turnover is to understand some of the key causes. Agents leave contact center jobs or the industry as a whole, for many reasons including:
1. Lack of internal alignment causes confusion and doubt about priorities and the future of the business, impacting employee productivity and morale, especially during an economic downturn.
Solution: Empower your agents with information. Top CEOs know employee loyalty is critical to retention. Consider how your organization can communicate more effectively, from setting the right tone to the way they receive critical information about the business.
2. Perception issues with contact center jobs leave many assuming that these are “dead ends” with low wages and limited growth potential.
Solution: Create ongoing training and growth opportunities to mitigate this perception and give your contact center agents new opportunities and clear growth paths.
3. Work is becoming more difficult as the “easy” communications are handled by customer self-service and AI-driven support options, yet training has not kept pace with increased demands for complex inquiries.
Solution: Provide quality and bias-free feedback and coaching for agent growth and success. Agents need both real-time feedback and coaching based on more than just key performance numbers. Real-time prompts and tips that suit how they work can empower them to learn and grow. Speech-to-text analytics can provide deeper insights into agent and customer well-being than traditional contact center metrics alone.
4. A disconnected multi-channel customer journey can leave both agents and customers frustrated with collecting the same information repeatedly, leaving agents with disjointed toolsets and multiple information sources to understand and resolve requests.
Solution: Streamline your tech stack and unify your data so that agents have access to tools that are intelligent and adaptive with customer data all in one place. Bonus: unified data helps all levels of the organization.
5. Monitoring tools may overlook agents’ skills leading to frustration and disconnect between agents and management.
Solution: Utilize AI-driven tools to not just handle basic inquiries, but to provide agents with real-time speech monitoring to help predict customer needs and provide context-relevant information and suggestions.
Underlying each of these challenges is a common thread: traditional contact center models are not keeping pace with today’s customer-centric business world with ever-evolving channels of interaction. When your company-wide goals are clear and engrained in the processes and tools you deploy, your agents can see how their role ties into the greater success of the company.
Getting a holistic understanding of experience–from how you manage and interact with your data, the tools you use, where and how your agents work, how you train and upskill your agents, and how you monitor performance–can provide a meaningful opportunity to improve strategy. When companies build an internal culture that values employee experience as part of customer experience, truly amazing transformation and outcomes can be achieved.
This is one of the core reasons SuccessKPI has a proven record of transforming CX and driving outcomes: we are a global company that prioritizes people at the core of our values while delivering a powerful insight and action platform that empowers people to create next-generation experiences.
Learn more about SuccessKPI’s story and the people behind it.
There are endless contact center metrics and KPIs that can be monitored but how much can they really tell you? Do you fully understand how to interpret them to affect positive change in your business? In this guide, we are going to look at the best contact center metrics and KPIs and show you how to leverage them to make data-driven decisions, demonstrate value to leadership, and reach both contact center and overall organizational goals.
You can make strong predictions and gain valuable insights about your business by looking at KPIs and metrics for customer satisfaction and agent performance. Monitoring the right metrics unlocks your ability to make data-driven decisions rather than guessing or going off a “hunch.” Today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business needs leave little room to falter. Staying ahead of customer demands is an important tactical strategy against competitors. Below are three primary categories and their associated metrics to further demonstrate how this data can help your organization rise to the top.
When you monitor the right agent productivity contact center metrics, you can gather critical insights into more than just how individuals are performing. Agent success hinges on proper training, team and managerial support, an effective tech stack, transparency into the rest of the business, and upskilling and career growth opportunities. Choosing the right agent productivity metrics to monitor will help you understand how well your entire customer service machine is running and where you can adjust to create better outcomes for agents and your customers.
What agent-focused contact center metrics should you focus on and what do they tell you? What makes a metric good or useful? The best agent-oriented metrics focus on measuring actual agent productivity while avoiding those that are outside of agent control, and can create unfavorable outcomes as a result. Let’s break them down:
Beyond just understanding the standard definition of these metrics, it’s important to understand how they reflect on both your contact center and business performance. When your agents are struggling, it can mean they are feeling unsupported or lack the tools or training needed. With the right information, you can make data-driven improvements to your staffing, tech stack, or training and mentoring programs.
For example, long after-call work times may indicate that you have inefficient workflows that need to be streamlined or automated. High transfer rates can either be an agent issue or a call routing problem – consider reviewing your phone trees and look for opportunities to implement intelligent IVR to improve routing. And FCR, of course, provides powerful insight into individual and overall agent performance. Low average FCR could be a good indicator that your agents lack the training, tools, and/or easy access to relevant data needed to assist customers.
Making changes means getting alignment all the way up the leadership chain. Using data gathered from these agent performance contact center metrics you can demonstrate the following value points to leadership:
That said, agent performance only tells us one half of the whole story. Happy agents will often mean happier customers, but how can you be sure? Customer experience contact center metrics are a helpful guide on their own but are even more powerful when correlated and analyzed alongside your agent performance metrics to more precisely identify areas for improvement.
So, which metrics tell you the most about the customer experience? Tracking contact center KPIs across the customer lifecycle gives you an end-to-end view of how your customers interact with your business, and how they feel about it. Let’s break them down:
As you can see, some of these metrics are contact center-specific and some are broader, looking at the customer journey as a whole. When a customer is reaching out for support, monitoring call initiation metrics is key to ensuring they have a positive experience. But how they interact with all other areas of your business can make or break their loyalty.
CSAT, and churn are great high level metrics that tell you how your customers are feeling, with the rest helping to paint a more complete picture. Call initiation metrics are especially telling – customers commonly reach out for support because something is already wrong. When they must wait an excessive amount of time to get through, if they get through at all, they are much more likely to have low satisfaction and are more likely to churn.
For leadership, the benefit of improving customer experience scores is an increase in NPS, LTV, and overall customer loyalty. With the right metrics, you can understand where your challenges are –– at the contact center level, or elsewhere within your business. The more you know about the customer experience the better you can adapt and respond to changing customer needs.
Operational metrics are important for understanding staffing as well as where and how your customers communicate with your business. This data can help you understand the maturity of your digital processes and highlight areas where a deeper investment may be warranted.
So, what exactly do these numbers tell you? High service level usage (~80%) tells you that your contact center has excellent performance. However, extremely high occupancy rates can indicate understaffing –– monitoring this allows you to predict the likelihood of agent burnout and adjust staffing levels accordingly. Channel switching and self-service are both helpful in understanding not only where and how customers communicate, but how well you are able to assist them through those channels.
The value of understanding, and addressing, these metrics is how deeply they are tied to metrics in the other categories. For example, allowing customers with basic questions to self-serve means agents are more available to address customers’ more complex needs, reducing agent burnout and increasing customer satisfaction.
The most important takeaway when assessing contact center metrics is to understand that no metric or KPI exists in a vacuum. The results of one lends insight into others. Correlating this data to drive effective, value-focused decision-making not only keeps customer satisfaction and agent performance high but it also helps you stand out amongst your competitors.
Found this guide helpful? Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, where we’ll dig deeper into the analytics.
By 2024, global spending on AI, will reach $110 billion (IDC). No matter where you are today in our ML journey, you need a data strategy that works for your business needs now and for the future.
AI and Machine learning hold the power to completely transform existing business process and create new marketing and ways of thinking entirely. But at the heart of the success of these technologies is data. Data is the heartbeat of AI and ML, and unlocking its potential is one of the most important business challenges we face today.
Over the past decade, data has become the centerpiece of digital transformation. More today than ever before. It is no wonder that at this year’s AWS re:Invent AI/ML keynote, Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of machine learning at AWS, focused on the importance of data to achieving excellence with ML. After two years of virtual meetings, it was invigorating to be present for Swami’s keynote live and in person. He shared, “From modernizing your data infrastructure to unifying your data to the best of data lakes and analytics innovating with machine learning — this is going to help you re:invent data immensely.”
Looking at the themes, so much is relevant to how we are approaching harnessing data with our technology at SuccessKPI:
What is powering the ML revolution? It is all about how customers are reinventing their business with data. “Data is the underlying force that fuels the insights and the predictions that help you make better decisions and spur completely new innovations.” Swami shared.
For example, tuition and Student Loan Assistance company, Edcor, tackled a digital transformation project which included a new cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect and USAN-based technologies to replace a legacy on-prem set of technologies. SuccessKPI provided integrated analytics between Amazon Connect and USAN-based solutions. Edcor created full suite of analytic capabilities, including custom reporting, real-time and historical analytics, a robust AI/ML based speech & text analytics, custom QM scorecards and Automated Agent Scoring powered by AI. For their innovative solution, Edcor captured an Honorable Mention in the Best in Class Contact Center category at the 2021 CCW Excellence Awards.
“Big data” was coined in 1987, and since then, data has been multiplying through organizations like never before. Not just neat, structured data but 80% of data today is unstructured. Diverse data like images, documents, handwritten notes, geospatial data are spreading faster than most companies can keep track of often making it a challenge when trying to get value out of the data
While tackling unstructured data can be challenging, it is imperative to your current business and future. “It is the survival of the most informed, and those that can put that data to work to make better, more informed decisions, and respond faster to the unexpected and uncover completely new opportunities. Those are the businesses that are going to thrive,” Swami presented.
SuccessKPI analytics platform provides 360-degree view combining un-structured data (such as call recordings, chat transcripts, emails, social media data feed etc), CRM systems (such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics etc), HR and Time tracking systems (Workday, Deltek etc), contact center interactions data (Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio, etc). Our Customers are uncovering new insight combining all data together and making informed decisions to operation their business.
The use cases of machine learning across all industries are incredible.
The CDC faced the initiative to get the entire country vaccinated, as part of their strategy “the CDC worked with Maximus and AWS partner, SuccessKPI…to understand an end-to-end view of agent effectiveness and insights into the root causes of vaccination hesitancy.” Swami highlighted as a key success story.
This CDC use case was also presented in one of AWS re:Invent’s breakout sessions,” Accelerating innovation with AI and ML”. The full solution required tuning up 21k+ agents in under 8 weeks, including testing at scale. The solution included end to end visibility into topics, themes, sentiment, caller journeys, effectiveness of IVR and WFM insights in addition to handling conversations from the caller.
The Australian swim team has their eyes set on winning gold at the Olympics in 2024, and AWS shared how they are hoping to do that with the help of machine learning. With the AWS solution, the team has been able put data like stroke mechanics, psychologic testing, race analysis, skills, turn metrics all together to better understand each swimmer’s performance, and extract peak performance in the pool.
Building a comprehensive end to end data strategy is not always an easy and straightforward journey. According to a McKinsey survey of B2B companies, 86% of respondents said they wished they could do more with data.
Implementing a modern end-to-end data strategy is more important than ever. One that can handle the enormous growth in data and one that can tie together the full data journey from storing your data to putting your data to work.
Swami’s three key elements to a modern end-to-end data strategy
In his keynote Swami concluded, “data driven organization is imperative today and for the future of your organization. It is the difference between the companies that will just survive or those that are going to thrive.”
Watch Swami’s keynote and SuccessKPI’s CDC use case here:
AWS re:Invent 2021 – Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning Keynote with Swami Sivasubramanian
Call center analytics software is a vital tool for any business that thrives in a competitive environment. It allows you to analyze crucial data, track quality KPIs, and improve customer satisfaction. There is a wide variety of analytics software to choose from, depending on the nature of the contact center.
Having high-quality call center analytics software improves the return on investment significantly. The analytics derived from the software can help the organization provide better solutions and improve customer experience.
Here are some of the reasons why you should invest in high-quality call center analytics software:
The primary role of call center analytics software is to track the KPIs and metrics. To improve its overall efficiency, every organization has to track various metrics that define its performance. The top metrics include:
These KPIs provide measurable values that demonstrate the call center’s performance. You have to invest in software that can deliver the right analytics.
Contact center analytics software provides agents with cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Both managers and agents can analyze conversations that lead to more sales. With that, they can leverage the data to deliver the right products to the right customers.
The software allows contact centers to conduct real-time customer evaluations, enabling agents to optimize marketing messages. Also, agents can utilize real-time analytics to provide tailored solutions, which reduces churn.
Continuous training is crucial in any organization. It equips agents with the ultimate knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the increasingly competitive environment.
A high-quality call center analytics software provides insights into agents’ KPIs and metrics. These metrics help gain deeper insights into the agents’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling managers to create efficient training programs. This training allows agents to improve their call handling and solution delivery techniques. It also provides agents with insights on call performance and areas that they need to adjust.
A great call center analytics software translates to a higher customer experience in that it proves crucial customer satisfaction data. You can track the customer satisfaction score, effort score, average handle time, and other crucial CX metrics through the software.
With effective call center analytics software, you can continuously work on improving your customer support approach.
Customers become more satisfied when they can receive solutions by the first call. That’s why every call center needs to invest in high-quality analytics software that provides customer information beforehand. Agents can pull data related to the customer’s history and leverage it to provide solutions.
A high-quality contact center analytics software reduces costs and increases revenue in many ways. You can avoid lots of live calls through Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Customers can self-serve without having to connect with live agents.
The call center can improve first-call resolution, reducing unnecessary callbacks and transfers. And the software helps the organization to avoid fines for noncompliance, especially in handling customer data.
Every business deserves high-quality call center analytics software that can analyze all interactions effectively. A good call center analytics software provides an in-depth collaborative effort from all parts of the business and makes data actionable.
SuccessKPI aims to take customer experience to the next level. This software analyzes calls, speech, sentiments, and customer responses in time to reward your organization with actionable insights.
To learn more about how SuccessKPI can transform your organization, contact us today or schedule a demo!
Modern-day organizations receive massive amounts of text data from clients through various channels, such as IVR, chatbots, and social media. Processing the sheer volume of information can be challenging, and that’s why most organizations are turning to text analytics.
Text analytics automates the process of analyzing and visualizing unstructured text data. This technology utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) to transform text conversations into measurable data points. It provides cutting-edge benefits for businesses that want to deliver a superhuman customer experience.
The text analytics dashboard is an excellent alternative to flawed CX approaches. It has numerous features and capabilities to help you deliver a great customer experience.
Here we look at just a few.
The text analytics dashboard displays all customer interaction data in real time, detecting pain points and factors that cause customer dissatisfaction. This helps businesses flag any issues and take immediate action.
Text analytics uses NLP to detect emotions, sentiments, and tone changes. This helps agents de-escalate conversations easily. With this tool, you can understand the overall emotion, anger, or feeling behind a conversation. You can quickly uncover hidden trends even without having to do customer surveys.
It’s like listening to customers talk about your brand. Text analytics helps derive actionable insights from each conversation better than surveys.
The text analytics dashboard allows you to customize your reports. You can choose the KPIs and metrics that you want to track based on your organizational goals. All you need is to create dashboards that enable you to view the most crucial data. Also, you can filter the information to display what you are only interested in.
With a reliable text analytics dashboard, you can track different metrics to measure the call center’s performance. Some of the highly tracked CX metrics include:
These metrics are essential in monitoring the call center’s performance. You can track them over time to identify whether your customer experience strategies are working.
Customer retention is a major problem in many organizations. Many modern companies experience high churn rates as customers turn to their competitors for more efficient solutions.
Text analytic dashboards help track causes of dissatisfaction and issues that make customers seek alternatives. Through the sentiments, you can easily notice issues and avert a churn crisis. Also, they measure the churn rate before and after tweaking products or services. This helps an organization know how effective its product design is.
Contact center agents play a critical role in achieving organizational goals. Therefore, it’s essential to understand whether your agents help achieve your goals.
Through the text analytics dashboard, you can monitor how customers react to or feel about agents. This is a great way to understand your agents’ weaknesses and strengths. Also, you can use these analytics to reward agents according to their performance.
As evident above, text analytics dashboards have the power to transform CX in the call center. All you need is to implement the right text analytics dashboard with the essential features and capabilities.
SuccessKPI’s customizable call center analytics dashboard allows you to monitor conversations in real time and track key metrics. It’s optimized to help contact center managers and agents derive actionable insights from text conversations and elevate the customer experience. Contact us today to implement SuccessKPI in your call center or book a demo!
Hard to believe, but it’s been thirty years since I first walked into a contact center—C&P Telephone Company of Virginia located in Richmond, Virginia, which would later become part of Verizon. Back then they weren’t even called “call centers”, let alone “contact centers”. People referred to them as “business offices”.
The journey that got me to here as the founder and CEO of a SaaS company is one for another day, but the seed of what inspired me began back then. Jim Trent and Beth Sorah were two of my many early mentors. They taught me to solve problems with data. One of my first assignments was (in a pre IVR world) to provide a “comprehensive series of recommendations to improve business office [contact center] access [service level] to our residential [consumer] callers during peak capacity.”
That was thirty years ago? Just yesterday, I was helping a senior executive with a major enterprise, solve this same problem. WOW! Nothing has changed. And yet everything has changed. It got me thinking about the metrics and visibility we were using and how fast we moved and why a drillable, BI-powered, contact center dashboard can be so powerful.
Managing a call center requires organizations to constantly dial into performance metrics. The objectives may vary from increasing customer satisfaction and reducing handle time, to meeting SLAs (service level agreements) or improving First Call Resolution (FCR). A real call center analytics dashboard gets far beyond the metrics and far beyond the reports available from even the best CCaaS platforms. Great dashboards are interactive and tell a complete story. Real, BI-Powered analytics tools present organizations with a visual display that simplifies analysis and reduces the time required to consume information. Such dashboards are drillable and allow you to move from high level information into the underlying to sample what is happening for real. With such a dashboard in place, teams can review performance at a glance, and then drill in and manipulate these visualizations and even derive advanced metrics to truly understand root cause issues.
At the age of “Customer Experience first,” it is increasingly important for organizations to get real-time insights from call center data. In the case of our enterprise client, IVR usage had doubled at a time of peak capacity. Many executives would have celebrated at the amazing coincidence of enhanced automation in crisis. My business partner was savvy and a bit skeptical and knew that no new functionality could explain this rise in “containment” and was worried. Twenty minutes and a few manual drillable inspections later, we discovered that a tree error (coincidentally introduced a week before the big launch of calls) had trapped callers in a loop! Only a dashboard with trending and drill capability would have gotten us there in 20 minutes. You cannot SEE your calls. But a drillable dashboard with trending flags allowed us to identify the problem in minutes and then to inspect the underlying conversations to hear what was happening.
Data helps identify the weaknesses, strengths, triumphs, and faults of an organization in various areas. Modern-day enterprises use data to improve and enhance business operations and to stay on their toes just like this. But the right dashboards lead us there.
Customer service is just one of the critical areas where call center data and dashboards have an enormous impact. Call centers can use the reports generated from analytic dashboards to monitor agent performance, set targets, and identify inefficiencies.
Organizations improve interactions with customers by using call center dashboards to increase productivity and enhance complaint resolution rates.
Data derived from dashboards provide insights that help identify service inefficiencies. Call center leaders can streamline business processes, cut costs, connect WFM findings with agent findings, and enhance service delivery using call center dashboard reports.
Agent metrics help organizations support call center team members who need help in their roles. As a result, management can engage staff using a more personable approach and identify those that are thriving and those who are in trouble. Staff members are happier in this setup, and this enhances the level of support given to customers.
Analytic dashboards enable organizations to spot trends and address potential issues as they occur. Consequently, call center staff members can stop any issues before they spiral out of control like we saw with the IVR example above.
If the dashboard presents the data in an intuitive, interactive, and visually appealing format, staff members can view, analyze, absorb, and share it easily. As a result, cross-departmental collaboration becomes easier, and organizations save valuable time.
Communication is critical for any organization. Analytic dashboards are available to call center teams through multiple mediums, including PC, tablets, and mobile phones. Call center agents can access critical metrics at the click of a button or the swipe of a screen 24/7.
Are you stuck with basic contact center reporting from 30 years ago? Let us help you modernize your contact center information flow with vibrant, drillable and fully connected dashboards that put YOU in control of your operations.
SuccessKPI.com helps organizations to get rid of data silos and unlocks a 360-degree view of call center operations. Find out more here on our website.
Or better yet, watch this webinar to learn key recommendations and steps to put you in control of your CX transformation.
This week, we announced the launch of our new Global Partner Program at SuccessKPI and the leadership appointment of Director and Head of Channels, Emil Modugno. Prior to SuccessKPI, Modugno designed, led, and grew go-to-market channel partnerships and programs to over 75 in less than two years at Zoom Video Communications. As the market demand for SuccessKPI’s Insight and Action Platform rises, Modungo will be well positioned to help launch the next generation of AI-powered contact centers
In this interview, SuccessKPI’s Vice President of Marketing Kathleen Atkins digs deeper into Modugno’s vision for empowering channel partners around the globe.
Kathleen Atkins (KA): Welcome to SuccessKPI, Emil! It’s great to have you on the team. How are you able to leverage your previous channel successes and insights as you launch the new channel program here?
Emil Modugno (EM): In my last appointment at Zoom, we were entirely focused on providing great customer experience through video technology. At SuccessKPI, we’re able to take a customer-focused mindset to the next level and transform the entire journey, with the contact center being at the heart of the experience.
In today’s climate coming out of the pandemic and with the uncertain political and economic environment, a positive contact center exchange especially during a time of need has the power to turn someone’s day around. Businesses are focused on delighting their customers and agent employees in more collaborative and streamlined ways. SuccessKPI is purpose-built to bring easy, actionable enterprise-wide business insights into the contact center and customer experiences. We are able to empower and coach the contact center reps to truly solve the customer’s challenges.
“…a positive contact center exchange has the power to turn someone’s day around…By focusing on customer delight, we are able to empower and coach the contact center reps.”
Put simply, when agents are happy and fulfilled, they provide the sort of customer experiences that can change an organization’s reputation for the better. Using this global channel program, we will be able to deliver this type of game-changing performance at scale.
KA: In your experience, what types of challenges have you seen organizations experience when it comes to effectively communicating with their channel partners?
EM: SuccessKPI is uniquely positioned to address critical issues that are impacting a business negatively, while focusing on their success–after all, it’s in our name! We’re able to genuinely help channel partners understand how we can do more for their clients and customers, and substantially retain and grow revenue in the process.
In fact, the whole idea of organizations being able to “do more” really stokes the fires of excitement for everyone. They can leverage new solutions that bring intelligence and transparency to the performance of their organization. They can better understand how to better support their agents. And with SuccessKPI, the agents are able to help clients in multiple languages and have dynamic, AI-driven playbooks that empower them to help customers more quickly and successfully.
“…with SuccessKPI, the agents are able to help clients in multiple languages and have dynamic, AI-driven playbooks that empower them to help customers more quickly and successfully..”
When you focus on the positive outcomes, you can do more for the whole contact center ecosystem. That’s the approach we’ve taken with our channel partners and, so far, the response has been productive.
KA: How are you able to use the core values of SuccessKPI to empower the partner ecosystem?
EM: This channel program wouldn’t be possible without the strong cultural foundation already in place at SuccessKPI. And the market has noticed, too. I just think back to the strategic investment of $33M to accelerate our global growth. It really proves that we have a rich value system and an effective springboard to help modernize contact centers. When the CEO approached me, the opportunity to put some structure to the rich channel relationships was a no-brainer, thanks to the culture of SuccessKPI.
SuccessKPI’s values are:
The value I have been coming back to over and over again is that we make simple things easy and complex things possible. Technology is already complex. SuccessKPI can bring value to anyone with a contact center tech stack without making it more complicated. And we’re bringing that same philosophy to our channel programs.
“The value I have been coming back to over and over again is that we make simple things easy and complex things possible.”
KA: How do you see things evolving for SuccessKPI’s channel program?
EM: As a startup, adaptation and evolution are built into the fabric of our work. The channel program is no different. We’re expanding every day in response to the growing partner community. There are no boundaries on solutions – we’re committed to adapting to each unique partner situation.
It’s critically important to the growth of our channel program to have everything they need to sustain excellent customer experiences.
KA: Tell me more about how you collaborate with the channel community. How does that impact the work you do?
EM: Great question! One of the most important things I’m focused on at SuccessKPI is that we provide impartial, honest, and predictable processes. Two of our founding principles are transparency and reciprocity. We’re about enabling and strengthening our partners’ relationships with their clients. We want to find new ways for them to, frankly, gain new revenue streams. The best way to do that is to work collaboratively with the partners and that’s a two-way street.
“Two of our founding principles are transparency and reciprocity. We’re about enabling and strengthening our partners’ relationships with their clients.”
KA: What else do you want the channel partners to know about SuccessKPI and the partner program you’re building?
EM: We welcome all your ideas. If you have an idea of how to improve customer experience, we want to hear from you. We want to involve our partners in advancing AI/machine learning technology and make it even better for those who use it.
Learn more about what Emil Modugno is building and see how you can benefit from it as a partner.
Managers should proactively evaluate KPIs to monitor performance. Contact center KPI metrics give a clear view of customer satisfaction, responses, and sales.
It’s relatively easy to obtain KPIs, but the challenge is formulating the right ones to track. However, there are specific ones that help you measure inbound call success. If you want to determine whether your call center is performing efficiently, it’s best to narrow it down to a limited number of metrics and actionable KPIs.
Here are the top contact center KPI metrics to watch:
Service level usage is a contact center metric that measures the percentage of agents’ answered calls within a certain period. The analytics dashboard displays this metric in real time, and both agents and managers can leverage it to make crucial decisions. A high service level of around 80 percent indicates excellent call center performance.
The ASA is the average time for an agent to answer a call within a specified time frame. Ideally, the ASA should be lower than 28 seconds. A lower ASA indicates that customers spend less time waiting before agents answer calls, limiting call abandonment. On the other hand, a high ASA indicates customers stay on the call longer, indicating poor customer service.
AHT is the average time an agent takes on a call, including the hold time. To figure out the average handle time, simply calculate the total time spent on calls divided by the number of calls. This contact center KPI metric gives insights into an agent’s efficiency and performance in solving customer concerns.
A low AHT might indicate customer frustration or an agent’s difficulty in solving issues. It may also suggest that customers don’t understand some things, hence the need for more explanation from agents. Managers can use this metric to determine which agents require more training on handling calls.
How long do agents keep customers on hold? The average hold time is the percentage of time spent on hold against the total time on the call.
A high average hold time indicates agents keep customers on hold for a longer period. It also indicates that agents have to find solutions elsewhere, making the customer wait. This could ruin the customer experience and lead to a high churn rate.
The transfer rate is the percentage of calls that agents transfer to other people to provide solutions. There could be many reasons for a transfer, and call center managers should figure out these reasons. Ideally, your call center should have a low transfer rate.
The FCR is among the most important call center KPI metric related to customer satisfaction. It measures the percentage of calls resolved by the first interaction with the contact center. The FCR is the percentage of calls where an agent has addressed the customer’s needs without transferring elsewhere. A low FCR indicates that customers get solutions on the first contact and results in higher satisfaction.
The customer satisfaction score indicates how satisfied or unsatisfied the customer is. Surveys regarding agents’ resolutions are the data collected for this score. The feedback scale typically ranges as follows:
The total customer satisfaction score measures the percentage of satisfied and very satisfied customers against the number of respondents. A low CSAT indicates that most customers aren’t satisfied, or agents don’t meet their expectations when providing solutions.
These contact center KPI metrics provide valuable insights into the inbound call performance. Any call center manager who wants to improve inbound call success and customer experience should utilize these metrics.
SuccessKPI is the ultimate contact center solution that provides the necessary contact center KPI metrics to measure inbound call success and performance. Our tool provides all essential metrics that you may need to improve efficiency in the call center. Contact us today or schedule a demo to understand how you can revolutionize your organization with SuccessKPI!
Quality assurance (QA) is the process organizations use to ensure excellent products and services. A comprehensive QA data evaluation process highlights common issues and is imperative to exceptional customer service.
Unless your organization delivers unbeatable customer service, you’ll continuously observe high churn and low retention issues.
Your QA enables you to monitor performance and identify flaws easily. It should help you determine how happy your customers are, as well as how well or bad you are performing. This is essential if you want to deliver an unbeatable customer experience.
Let’s look at a few call center QA data evaluation methods.
Scorecards are among the most efficient call center QA data evaluation methods. With a scorecard, you use a set of metrics to determine how an agent is performing.
All you need is to choose various metrics and score the agent’s performance based on those metrics. They simplify QA data evaluation and provide insights into interactions. You can utilize the scores to identify the agent’s strengths and weaknesses and areas that he or she needs to improve. The scores also help understand key areas where agents might need training.
How often do you conduct customer surveys? Surveys are essential evaluation tools, especially during the pandemic when customers are looking for maximum efficiency.
You should invite customers to take surveys on the quality of service they receive. This is a great way for customers to share their thoughts about your service provision and the entire organization. Through these surveys, you’ll also discover the areas that have left them unsatisfied.
What makes customers highly satisfied or dissatisfied? Measuring customer satisfaction is a delicate process that involves various aspects that change over time. Customers may be satisfied one minute but not the next. Or they may become more satisfied even after starting at an indifferent position. As a result, it’s essential to continually measure the key drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
You can measure customer satisfaction through social media, post-service surveys, and metrics, such as:
These methods can help you understand areas that make customers happy or unhappy. With the right information, you can start optimizing your customer satisfaction.
The majority of organizations provide training on one-off instances. However, this process is ineffective, especially with the increasingly competitive business environment because of the pandemic. Companies should provide agents with continuous training to ensure they can cope with the gradually changing environment.
Automating processes in the call center is a proper QA data evaluation strategy. Automation provides faster feedback and improves the team’s efficiency.
Quality assurance managers should integrate automated tools that provide real-time QA data evaluation. From the call center analytics software to the reporting dashboards, every essential component should have automation features. It helps teams to execute routine tasks at scale.
Call center QA data evaluation is a critical aspect of contact center management. The analyzed and evaluated data provides actionable insights into areas that need improvement. The data also help lower churn and increases customer retention.
All you need in your contact center is the right tools to measure crucial metrics and give your business a competitive edge. At SuccessKPI, we provide a comprehensive call center management platform with all the essential capabilities. SuccessKPI is fully automated and optimized to solve business challenges and improve customer experience. Book a demo or contact us today to revolutionize your call center QA data evaluation with SuccessKPI!
2020 has been tagged with every adjective — it deserves no further introduction or attention. Yet during all the 2020 dark days, some unique opportunities emerged for those who made moves to the cloud. Especially those who unlocked the power of serverless architectures.
One of the bright stars to emerge during this difficult year was the launch of Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions to help enterprises manage the losses and complexity precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic and the resulting restrictions highlighted the need for enterprises to invest in a remote workforce, and to learn how to work remotely with skill.
The pandemic left many contact centers, even those with well-crafted disaster recovery plans, scrambling to develop a response strategy. The virus set the stage for the overwhelming impetus for enterprises to change the way they do business.
According to a study by Nemertes, remote contact centers are now here to stay. Based on this permanent change, organizations must now focus on improving customer satisfaction, simplifying quality management, boosting employee satisfaction, and cutting costs — without being able to address the technology and humans in one place.
Our team sat down to think about the past year and to organize our point of view. Here are our top seven strategies to help organizations make the most out of the crisis with a CCI investment.
At the height of the pandemic, enterprises that invested in distributed operations and home-based infrastructure fared better than those operating from brick-and-mortar locations.
For this reason, enterprises must invest in dispersing resources across the map and deploying at-home resources. Using a hybrid model with both physical and remote workers in the future can maximize the diversification and flexibility of resources, skills, resource pools and locations. In this way, contact centers can deploy agents for various support and volume needs and tap into far broader recruiting and training pools, to improve the strength of the team through diversity, and to even achieve time zone benefits.
Organizations have to be ready for the next crisis. Disasters will happen, whether man-made or natural, and they will draw large volumes of support.
Service capabilities enabled by remote workers allow organizations to deploy emergency staff during times of distress and to throttle back more quickly without needing to call team members to on site locations.
Contact center leadership must now prioritize digital transformation tools. Customer-facing organizations can no longer afford to keep these tools on the back burner. Leaders must realize having the right digital tools is necessary now that they’ve had to deploy solutions quickly.
Automation, messaging, AI-enabled learning, and cloud-based systems should become a mainstay in the contact center. Mixing agents and technology has allowed organizations to cut costs and increase contact resolution, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity. Contact center intelligence tools are at the forefront of the digital-first move.
When the pandemic hit, it took a lot of effort to support the urgent needs in every facet of life. There was a triaging of human resources to arising emergencies that made self-service a critical requirement. Online FAQ, smart IVRs, knowledge bases, and chatbots became essential call deflection solutions. Now these tools can be made better, more friendly. Use AI to improve the sentiment and customer experience of automation now that the crisis is easing.
Moving to self-service enables organizations to get a lot more service capacity going into the future without increasing labor. The advancements made to date allow customers to get relevant information quickly without going into the voice channel. But we can make them more durable and permanent by making them better.
With the growth of remote work in the contact center, there is a need for security policies to adapt to the new normal. Organizations can, therefore, use these technologies securely.
Video monitoring can help organizations have more flexible working arrangements without driving up costs. IT leaders now have to rethink their approaches. If you can make it secure in a dispersed environment, you can make it more secure across the board for all users.
For the foreseeable future, in-person sales will continue to dwindle. As a result, untargeted sales strategies will be insufficient because of tight budgets.
Organizations can leverage advanced analytics in the form of sales, sentiment, topic, and theme correlation to help target the most qualified leads and retention opportunities and to identify best practices that lead to better sales and service outcomes. By pairing the perks of analytics with an optimized in-house sales team, organizations will increase the speed and ability to close.
Having remote sales agents will allow for more flexibility. Agents will need to connect with customers for cross-selling/upselling, replacements, and renewals as organizations lean toward distributed operations and locations.
Training agents is one of the critical requirements of good CX. Post covid in a remote work environment, organizations have to reimagine the new hybrid model’s classroom environment. In this environment, agents work both remotely and on-premises. In addition, AI based agent assistance techniques in the forms of next best action and agent knowledge base screen pops can accelerate learning for newly trained agents.
Going forward, organizations have to leverage digital solutions, such as AI-driven training, and AI driven work tools with practice scenarios, gamified learning, and real time assist. Contact center leadership has to embrace existing and emerging virtual training methods through personalized, self-paced training and on the job assistance tools, supported by personal check-ins and ongoing assessments.
Mobility restrictions occasioned by the pandemic have changed the way organizations operate. Contact centers have been in the thick of it. Enterprises can leverage Contact Center Intelligence tools to thrive in the new normal by using robust call center analytics tools.
For more information, learn more about Call Center Analytics.