Bad customer experience costs companies an average of $75 billion per year. To compete with other market leaders, maintain consumer loyalty, and minimize turnover, companies must constantly invest in improving and optimizing their customer experience strategy. An important part of this strategy starts with evaluating and enhancing the contact center.
A healthy, streamlined contact center equipped with engaged, experienced agents ensure you can deliver the kind of meaningful experiences your customers want.
How do you successfully track the performance of your contact center in a way you can successfully share with your senior management team?
Measuring Success: The Basics
Being able to measure the success of your contact center effectively has several benefits. First, it provides you a clear, data-driven view of which parts of your contact center strategy need more work and how to drive your brand’s best outcomes.
Secondly, a good set of measurements mean you can highlight the benefits of your contact center technology as tools for turning your customer service environment into a “value center” for business leaders. So, what kind of metrics do you need?
Start simple, with measurements capable of clearly demonstrating the ROI of your contact center. With your contact center wallboards and dashboards, you can track things like:
- Team efficiency
- Operational costs
- CSAT scores
Let’s take a closer look at some of the components of measuring success.
Team Efficiency and Operational Costs
It’s a good idea to start with an overview of how much you’re spending on essential operations. Monitoring your operational costs gives you a solid basis for your return on investment. You’ll need to know how much you’re spending on running your company to compare it to how much you’re making with the help of your contact center tools.
For instance, if you want to show business leaders how necessary a positive employee experience is to improve revenue or decrease operational costs, you might consider the impact of combining UCaaS and CCaaS tools. Increasingly, companies find that better, more streamlined agent experience automatically translates to better customer experience. Combining UC and CCaaS environments can provide teams with more of the support and information they need to drive better business results.
Evaluating the cost of the tools you invest in compared to the benefits you get regarding the number of calls answered, first contact resolution rates, and time to answer can give you an excellent insight into how your investments boost team efficiency. You can measure how team efficiency leads to tangible results. Metrigy research found that companies can increase revenue by approximately 53% when integrating UC and contact center technology versus when these tools are used separately. Agent efficiency can also improve by around 31%, while operational costs decrease by 6%.
Examining Performance with CSAT Scores
Once you’ve got a good idea of your operational costs and team efficiency levels, you can look at outcomes, like customer satisfaction (CSAT scores) and how your investments influence your revenue potential.
CSAT scores are excellent for getting an insight into how each team member is taking the initiative for an exceptional experience for your customers. With your dashboards and agent wallboards, you’ll be able to display valuable information about customer happiness levels using results from surveys and questionnaires.
While measuring CSAT scores can require somewhat more work than just monitoring call resolution rates, it offers a range of benefits, including:
- Insights into exceeding customer expectations: You can learn what kind of issues lead to customer dissatisfaction problems and what your customers might need from you to improve their overall experience with your brand.
- Improved differentiation: When you know what customers like about your approach to CX, you can double down on those factors and use them as points of differentiation to set you apart from your competition.
- Reduce customer churn: if you know what causes your customers to leave a bad satisfaction score, you can take steps to eliminate these issues, reducing your risk of customer churn. Customer satisfaction surveys can even show you which clients are most likely to leave you for a competitor so you can act fast.
CSAT scores help give context to some of your other valuable metrics to understand what’s making a difference to your business.
Revenue Impact: Bringing it all Together
Taking a unified look at your CX metrics should make it easier to see how different activities and methods impact your revenue. You can look at numbers like revenue earned, customer lifetime value, and average order value as benchmarks to see how different strategies drive results.
Providing your shareholders and business leaders with an insight into how employee experience and customer satisfaction levels equate to incoming revenue can help them understand how vital certain CX investments might be.
