As anyone who runs a contact center knows, it is all about performance. With contact centers quickly becoming not just figuratively but literally the front door of company supply chains, and critical as the first line of interaction customers have with the brand, knowing how your contact center is doing when it comes to key performance indicators relating to the customer experience has become paramount.
Ann Arbor, MI-based ForeSee, a significant solutions vendor in technology-driven customer experience analytics, has revealed that 2013 has been a good year. It announced that 19 new companies have started measuring and analyzing the contact center customer experience with ForeSee. The companies include Allstate, Bissell, British Airways, Build-A-Bear Workshop, DTE Energy, and Pearson Higher Education, just to name a few. ForeSee says that many of these customers already use their solutions to measure their customers’ experience with touch points such as Web, mobile, and store.
ForeSee’s customer experience analytics go beyond the basics of measuring resolution times providing actionable insights that answer not just the obvious questions regarding “how we doing?” to enabling organizations to better understand where to improve their customer interactions. As ForeSee notes, their customers gain strategic and tactical insights across their entire contact center operations, including multiple touch points (live agent, IVR, chat, and email) and interaction types (sales, service) with ForeSee’s best-in-class measurement system.
“Keeping a pulse on consumers’ experiences with the contact center is critical to an organization’s success across all channels,” said Eric Head, ForeSee’s senior director of sales. “By measuring the customer experience correctly, a company gains actionable insights into areas for improvement while simultaneously using the predictive quality to project future success.”
The key performance indicators (KPIs) ForeSee employs measure critical aspects of the contact center experience such as knowledge, accessibility, and professionalism. The value comes from the fact that the KPI’s are designed to provide information from the customers’ perspective. The measurements generated give contact center managers data that can be used to coach and reward agent behaviors, and hence serve as great yardsticks for gauging how changes impact success.
“While the contact center tends to be the last resort for customers to engage with a company, it is, in a way, the company’s last line of defense for securing and maintaining a customer’s loyalty and relationship,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee. “Our research consistently demonstrates the powerful effect of customer satisfaction as we work with organizations that carefully measure and hone their contact center strategies to increase satisfaction.”
The entire area of customer experience analytics has gained prominence in recent years as improving customer experience has risen to the top of C-level concerns about how to obtain customers and keep existing customers not just loyal but hopefully turning them into brand advocates. Indeed, the success this past year of ForeSee is indicative of just how important granular performance analytics have become as contact centers continue to transform to vital centers for creating and sustaining competitive advantage.