Top 5 Performance Indicators for Assuring a Great Customer Experience

Tech issues, even small ones, can have an enormous impact on customer experience. For example, one major service provider that handles four million calls within its call center each month found itself facing a Quality of Service (QoS) nightmare when it realized that 19 percent of the calls—or 760,000 calls per month—were not utilizing the company’s IP backbone. Instead, the calls were going back out to the PSTN resulting in severely deteriorated voice quality, so bad that callers had to hang up and call back.

760,000 is a lot of frustrated customers in one month.

To try to find the problem and alleviate their customers’ frustrations, the company implemented an automated testing and measurement solution, which helped the company determine that the wrong routing rules were being used. Though the situation was resolved, it was not without ramifications to brand sentiment with regards to customer service. With the service quality assurance solution in place, these problems might have been pre-empted and avoided altogether.

Unfortunately, today’s contact centers are extremely complex featuring multiple communication channels, self-service applications, routing schemes, agent groups and vendor equipment. Often times, companies may not even know there is an issue until it’s reported by a customer.  Frustrated customers today have no problem taking their business elsewhere, and they’re likely to tell others about their experience. A complaint that years ago would have been aired to a small circle of family and friends can now easily reach thousands (maybe millions) via social media.

To better understand customer experience, it is important to track certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). By closely monitoring these KPIs in real-time, companies can spot service degradations and possibly preempt their impact on end-customers. Five important KPIs to watch include:

Call Blockage Rate:

Used by most contact centers today, the call blockage rate measures how well customers can access services. When solutions are not working properly or the contact center cannot handle the sheer volume of customer inquiries, calls are not answered. A high blockage rate has an immediate and negative effect on customer satisfaction.

Call Abandonment Rate:

High abandonment rates indicate application problems, incorrect routing latencies in back-end communications or inefficient management of customer service resources. These conditions result in frustrated customers who are unable to get their problems fixed in an efficient and timely manner.

Voice Quality of Service:

Poor voice quality reflects badly on any company. It also leads to an increase in call length when customers and agents cannot understand each other and are forced to continuously repeat themselves. In extreme cases, customers will hang up and try again. Either way, these delays can be extremely expensive to both customer loyalty and overall cost per call.

Repeat Calls:

This is a measurement of how many times a customer contacts the company before his or her issue is corrected. A variety of technical issues can lead to higher repeat call rates – improper routing, long queue lines, dropped calls and more. This KPI also reflects how successfully agents are able to satisfy customers, the first time. 

Mean Time to Diagnose:

Pinpointing the cause of problems in today’s complex environments can be difficult. Decreasing Mean Time to Diagnose is essential for limiting the negative impact on customers. Additionally, it drives considerable cost savings for the organization as support man-hours can add up quickly. 

No one wants to lose a customer because of a technical glitch. Fortunately, a new breed of performance monitoring solutions has emerged that can provide an end-to-end view of KPI performance across the entire contact center. More than just tracking how well the bits and bytes are floating through the network, they assess application performance, service quality, system delays and related factors to provide a true picture of customer experience. End-to-end performance monitoring simplifies KPI reporting and enables companies to more efficiently isolate, drill into and diagnose issues, thereby reducing their negative impact.

In the end, customers do not care how hard it is to manage complex contact center environments. They just want great service whenever – and however – they contact you.

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