When almost every business can be contacted via multiple channels by their customers, it's crucial to understand how to measure those interactions in a cohesive way that provides an overview of where you can improve upon the level of effort customers have to put into each of those interactions. Today's contact centers have access to so much data, but it's time to ask, "what are we measuring and why?" Organizations need the ability to blend case-specific data with more traditional metrics to understand the entire customer experience. 

It's important to isolate the areas of data that can provide actionable improvements in a contact center using these three types of metrics: traditional metrics, customer experience metrics, and agent metrics.  

Traditional Contact Center Metrics

Basic metrics like average handle time and occupancy rate are important to consider. I don't believe in sharing average handle time with frontline agents since this usually makes them feel pressured to reduce it. Instead, I believe it is our role as leaders to provide integrated systems that allow agents to be more efficient—and not their role as agents to find shortcuts to reduce handle time. The focus of each agent should be on providing a helpful and positive experience for the customer, not their average call length. 

Customer Experience Metrics

There are four key metrics within measuring customer experience that you need in order to look at the customer experience as a whole: first-contact resolution, customer effort, customer satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score. First-contact resolution is a great way to measure customer success because it indicates how many times customers have to make contact over the same problem. Obviously the goal is for customers to only have to reach out once to have their problem resolved. If this isn't the case however, then this is an area that needs improvement. Customer effort can be broken down into channel type, contact type, and agent. The goal here is to determine how easy it is for a variety of customers to reach you. Customer satisfaction can be easily measured by asking customers to rate their experience on a scale of 1-10 with your company during customer service interactions and recording their answers. Net Promoter Scores or NPS looks at the question "on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends and family?" When all of these metrics come together, they start to paint a picture of the holistic customer experience with a company. 

Agent Metrics  

While agents are usually measured based on average handle time and average number of cases handled in a certain period of time, there are some other agent-based metrics that can inform leaders about whether agents have access to the right tools and support to be successful. Measuring your knowledge availability can inform on how quickly agents are able to locate and use information they need in resolving an issue. This metric heavily impacts the other two key measurements which are agent satisfaction and employee turnover. While there is always a lot of focus on customer satisfaction, the truth is, employee satisfaction heavily impacts customers. Frequently checking in with agents and providing feedback tools are important. If agents are choosing to leave frequently, this also could be an indication of poor employee experience. It's important to act on the data from the agent surveys to continually improve the work environment and experiences that translate into happy customers. 

This post was adapted and abbreviated from the full-length article featured in Contact Center Pipeline's April issue. You can download the full PDF here to get all of the details: