The call center has evolved into a multichannel contact center. Customers have heightened expectations of service, and frontline staffs have new demands and requirements. Penny Reynolds, a co-founder of education company and contact center consultancy The Call Center School, outlines the 4 metrics associated with how she defines service to the caller.
Reynolds will lead “Planning Now for Your Seasonal Contact Center: Ten Operational Essentials for Maximizing Service and Profitability,” a pre-conference intensive at the 2013 Operations Summit on April 23.
Metric 1: Blockage: Measures indicating blockage (busy signals) by time of day or occurrences of “all trunks busy” situations are utilized by most centers. Failure to include a blockage goal allows a center to always meet its speed of answer goal by simply blocking the excess calls. This can have a negative effect on customer accessibility and satisfaction while the call center looks like it is doing a great job in terms of managing the queue.
Metric 2: Abandon rate: It should be noted, however, that abandon rate is not entirely under the contact center’s control. While abandons are affected by the average wait time in queue (which can be controlled by the call center), there are a multitude of other factors that influence this number, such as individual caller tolerance, time of day, availability of service alternatives, and so on.
Metric 3: Self-service availability: In the call center, self-service utilization is an important gauge of accessibility and is typically measured as an overall number, by self-service methodology and menu points, and by time of day or by demographic group. In the contact center, self-service utilization should also be tracked. In cases of Web chat, automated alternatives such as FAQs or use of help functions can reduce the requirement for the live interaction with a Web chat agent.