Customer service and customer experience blog for call center professionals
Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on the top call center metrics you need to be tracking . This expert panel discussed NPS for customer satisfaction, popular call center metrics, the future of the voice channel, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.
First, let’s take a quick look at the panel of speakers: Daniel Hong, Jon Arnold, and Shai Berger.
Everyone knows how important it is to monitor metrics, but do you know how to pick the right ones, and implement an effective strategy? The trick to successfully manage metrics is to specifically identify which data points are relevant to you, and to analyze what that data means to your organization. What makes this task so daunting for contact centers is the sheer number of metrics to choose from: Service Level, Customer Satisfaction Score, Abandon Rate, First Call Resolution, Average Speed to Answer, and the list goes on.
Ultimately, tracking the right numbers is essential to managing a well performing contact center. However, as call centers serve an increasing number of channels and agents are stretched into new roles, the act of choosing the right metrics becomes even more confusing. Continue reading
In the wide world of call center metrics, “service level” has always held a special place. It gives the industry a universally understood way to talk about how quickly calls are answered by agents. Its origins go back over 5 decades, to the earliest days of call centers.
The longevity of service level is astonishing when one considers the enormous changes that have occurred in customer service technology over the last few decades. Even more astonishing is that most call centers would name the same target value for that metric: the magical “80/20”.
Now – finally – this dominance may be fading. Contact centers are realizing more and more that adhering too closely to this one metric may not yield optimal results.
Today, changes to the contact center are a response to consumer behaviour, and not simply the result of business initiatives. In a climate where technology and customer preferences change at a breathtaking pace, it can be overwhelming to consider all the ways that your contact center needs to evolve.
This coming year, several key trends are poised to make a significant impact on contact centers around the globe. Some of these have transitioned from being “nice-to-haves” to being essential, while others are brand new and expected to play a substantial role. Ultimately, every call center needs to make decisions from the perspective of their customers.
Here are trends for 2018 that are sure to shake up the industry. Continue reading
Almost every contact center has to develop a strategy to deal with spikes in call volume. For some, spikes are a regular part of their traffic pattern. For others, spikes are unpredictable. Either way, the approach you take to deal with having more calls than you can handle says a lot about your company and – more importantly – sends a strong message to your customers.
We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the best the way to deal with spikes (hint: automated call-backs). That’s not the only solution though! You can, for example, increase you staff, or divert more calls to self-service options. However, with all the different strategies you can consider, one that is always wrong is sending callers to voicemail.
It’s easy to focus attention on all the changes that the contact center has undergone in the last few years. There’s been a radical transformation in the way we communicate with each other, and with companies. Today’s younger consumers can’t remember a time when the only way to reach a company was to go there in person or dial a phone. (For that matter, most of them don’t know why we even use the verb “dial”!)
But, despite all those changes, many aspects of the contact center operation haven’t changed. Calls come in, wait in a queue, connect with an agent, then hopefully get resolved. Many of the metrics that were designed decades ago are just as applicable today. Of these “classic” performance metrics, Service Level is the king.
What a huge year it was for bots! A term that was barely on the radar became a sizzling hot trend. Facebook kicked off the mania by opening its Messenger platform and now has 33,000 bots. Competing platforms have high numbers too: 19,000 for Kik and 10,000 for Line. It looks like 2017 will continue the momentum.
But after the hype comes the backlash. Too many expectations were placed on this idea, as I wrote in ChatBot Backlash Boogie Woogie (which includes a list of 4 specific expectations and why they were misguided.)
Now that we’re past the initial crush, it’s time for bots to start the slow climb to a mature technology. One of the clearest sign-posts along that climb is the metrics that are reported.
Customers today don’t want to waste time and energy calling, chatting or emailing with customer service when their answers can just as easily be found using self-service. Self-service is a win-win strategy for any service organization. It allows companies to provide online support with no agent interaction, and lets customers feel empowered to find answers in their own time.
Providing self-service options to your customers is critical for delivering a top-notch customer service experience. These stats prove why self-service will be even more important in 2017.
We live in the age of the customer and increasing expectations are making it harder than ever for contact centers to feel good about their operations. In fact, only 1% of customers feel that their expectations of good customer service are always met. *Ouch* It’s like what they say, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Today, contact centers and agents have to strive for excellence at every single touch point of a customer interaction to convince customers that they’re doing everything in their power to meet their needs. And as you can imagine, this task is much easier said than done.
Effective contact center communications involve a number of factors, and sometimes, even when everything appears to be in place, business needs can change. In order for managers to successfully optimize agent performance, it’s important that they keep their eyes peeled for these 5 big mistakes that happen every single day in the contact center: Continue reading
Newsflash: Only 1% of customers feel that their expectations of good customer service are always met. That factoid presents a gapping problem in the customer service industry and it’s about time we do something about it. If you’re experiencing higher than normal call volume, unbearable wait times, frustrated customers and depleting agent morale it’s time to get your customer service back on track.
Why you might ask? Other than keeping customers happy, customer service is the backbone of customer loyalty and revenue. By ignoring service and satisfaction you are ignoring up to 55% of consumers who have intended to make a purchase, but backed out because of poor customer service. In fact, 52% of consumers have made more purchases from a company after having a good customer service experience and 73% of consumers say friendly customer service reps can make them fall in love with a brand.
So, how can you get your customer service back on track and revenue back to your business? Here are 3 tips you need to follow: Continue reading
