Why you must choose your performance metrics carefully

Are the performance metrics you’re using for your call center still relevant in an omnichannel setup?

The trick in delivering high-quality customer support is to understand what truly matters to customers. It means learning about their evolving demands and then coming up with services that would satisfy those standards. Although it sounds simple, however, it’s far from being so.

To do this, organizations must rethink their existing strategies and redirect their priorities to align it with customers’ expectations. Your efforts, however, will be futile without a firm framework that would allow you to measure your performance and cross-evaluate it against people’s expectations. This is where customer service metrics would come in.

Updating your metrics

Customers’ expectations are evolving at a pace that matches the speed of technological growth. For instance, when smartphones made their way into mainstream consumption, people started to seek mobile customer service solutions. They want brands to be on Facebook and Twitter. They want web chat interactions and email. They want every existing channel to be available just for them, and this is why the omnichannel strategy became the norm among call centers.

But the way you reach customers isn’t the only thing that must change. You must also modify your performance assessment approach to capture these transformations. So if you’re leaving out this part as your call center evolves, chances are, your metrics are already outdated. Rethinking them is therefore the next step you need to take.

What metrics should you use?

As people want a personalized customer experience, call centers can no longer rely on traditional metrics like average handle time, first call resolution, and others. Rather, they must also find ways to measure performance from customers’ point of view. This entails generating feedback from customers. You may conduct surveys to ask customers how they felt during the transaction and whether their standards of good customer service were met. This is a more customer-centric way of evaluating your performance.

Also, you must definitely use channel-specific call center metrics. The standards you must set for the new platforms you’re deploying can’t be the same ones you’re using to evaluate, say, voice customer support. Customers simply have different expectations for each channel. With social media, for example, they want speed, while longer response times would be more acceptable when talking via email. If you apply the same set of performance metrics across all channels, the data you’ll gather will be inaccurate.

Boosting your call center’s performance

Your performance metrics can bring you insights useful for customer service training. Using these data, you can spot inconsistencies in the way you deliver customer support, letting you identify agents’ training needs. When the training programs you’re implementing are data-driven, you can effectively reduce or even eliminate the errors or lapses you usually commit.