You know why contact center performance matters. Customer service is a key factor that nearly all customers (95%) consider when making purchase decisions, according to the top customer service trends our team at Stella Connect by Medalla uncovered as part of a research study of more than 2,100 consumers in the US and UK.
The same study of customer support trends found that 67% of customers say they’ll stop doing business with a company after only a few negative customer service experiences.
If you’re not exactly sure how to measure your contact center performance — to discover what your customers really think of your contact center experience and how your contact center agents are influencing customer satisfaction and loyalty — you’ve come to the right place. Here’s how to measure your contact center performance in the moment to see what your team is doing right, and where there’s room for improvement.
Organizations use this customer experience metric to gauge overall customer satisfaction with a company’s products or services, assess customer service team performance, and monitor customer loyalty.
Brands with robust voice of the customer programs that capture real-time customer feedback about the customer experience can measure NPS by:
Customers that respond with a number between 0 and 6 on a scale of 0–10 are considered “detractors,” while 7–8 indicates satisfied (but neutral) customers, and those that respond 9–10 are satisfied, loyal “promoters.”
This KPI is a measure of how happy your customers feel about your products, services, or customer service interactions compared with their expectations.
As with the NPS score, brands can measure CSAT using real-time customer listening surveys by asking customers to rate their satisfaction level using a sale of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).
This can be measured at both the:
This KPI is used to determine how easy (or hard) it is for customers to accomplish something, such as get help from your organization’s customer service team. Wondering how to calculate your CES score? Companies find out their CES score by directly surveying their customers, asking them the level of effort a given task requires on a scale of 1 (high effort) to 7 (low effort), such as immediately following an interaction with a customer service agent.
As with NPS, these scores help reveal who your promoters are (those with a 5+ rating) and who your neutral/detractor customers are (those with a rating of less than 5).
Another top key performance indicator and measure of contact center performance, first contact resolution rate (FCR) is used to keep track of the rate at which contact center agents are able to address and fully resolve customer problems within the first outreach, whether over the phone, email, or during a live chat session.
You can measure first call resolution rate by surveying customers after a contact center interaction and asking, “Did we resolve your problem today?”
Customer sentiment is a qualitative assessment of customers’ views, attitudes, or opinions of a given brand, customer experience, or contact center interaction. Brands can measure customer sentiment by:
As part of their quality assurance programs, brands like Peek.com, Uncommon Goods, and SmartPak use real-time QA tools to review customer service interactions — agent phone calls, emails, and chats — in the moment and evaluate these conversations across a range of customer service performance scorecard measures.
Automated QA reviews are conducted to measure agent performance on soft skills and hard skills and help brands assess whether contact center agents are successfully:
Knowing how your contact center is tracking across these important metrics as a whole and how your team members are performing at the agent level is just the beginning. Want to see your contact center performance take off? Get your copy of our guide: 4 Steps to Supercharge Contact Center Agent Performance for insights on how to strengthen your team’s performance to deliver better experiences for your customers.
