Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

March 09, 2009

From Per-Minute to Per-Customer

By Rob Duncan


Tough Times are Driving Companies to Look beyond Traditional Performance Metrics
 
Like all industries today, the call center market is facing difficult economic challenges. While companies in this market are intimately familiar with pressures to drive cost to the bottom, lately it seems that clients are doing more due diligence, asking harder questions and demanding quantitative proof of performance before selecting an outsourcing partner. This is as it should be. As a home-based customer service provider, we not only embrace this higher standard of evaluation but encourage companies to demand prospective outsource partners provide proof of performance. And this means looking at more than just how fast someone can answer a call. In a time when every dollar counts, businesses should look for customer service organizations that augment traditional call center metrics with customer loyalty scores to create customized performance measurements.
 
Productivity is Just One Piece
In the beginning, call centers were established to streamline the process for resolving customer questions and problems. Most centers focused on answering in-bound product, service or billing questions. Since call centers were born out of a need for greater efficiency, it made sense that key performance indicators mainly focused on productivity statistics. Customer Care Professionals (CCPs) were (and are) evaluated on how fast they can do the job. Standard industry metrics include how long it takes to complete a call, how much time is spent talking to a customer and number of calls answered per hour.
 
These tried and true measurements still have an important role when looking at the performance of an organization. However, they should be one piece of a larger value-based evaluation process. Although these productivity-based metrics identify how busy a CCP is, they do not provide much insight into how effective he or she is at delivering true customer satisfaction.
 
Whether delivered through internal staff or outsourced, recent studies have proven a strong correlation between high-quality service and improved financials. Strong call center partners understand that the key to a client’s success lies in developing long-term relationships through quality interactions with every single customer. As a result, the call center industry is experiencing a shift from focusing strictly on a per-minute metric to concentrating on overall customer response. Home-based models are particularly suited to this relatively new type of evaluation due to their known ability for hiring quality employees who bring experience and empathy to customer interactions.
 
Measuring customer satisfaction can be time-consuming, expensive and difficult. I’ve been involved with customer service for many years and each organization I’ve worked with had a different way of defining and evaluating customer satisfaction. Many companies use some type of customer satisfaction survey with questions such as “How satisfied are you with the service you received?” While these responses are interesting, they rarely lead to actionable results. In the last few years, a new metric called NetPromoter™ has emerged that attempts to measure customer loyalty versus satisfaction. Introduced in 2003 by Frederick F. Reichheld of Bain & Company, the NetPromoter score gauges loyalty by asking customers on a 0 to 10 rating scale: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” According to Reichheld, the answer to this single question has been statistically linked to long-term corporate growth. Companies with a high percentage of customers willing to recommend their services or products to other people have higher revenue growth than those with a lower percentage of loyal customers. At Alpine Access we’re working with our more progressive clients to ask this question at the end of each call and are tracking the results.
 
Proactive Evaluation
Of course, evaluating performance for a single point in time isn’t enough. Quality customer care comes from proactively identifying trends in customer response or employee performance. Patterns or anomalies are then analyzed and combined with traditional metrics to understand root causes and elevate issues that negatively affect overall satisfaction. In this way, we can create a cycle of service that continuously evaluates, improves and delivers best practices across an entire program. Here’s a real example of how a flexible, partnership approach can improve service levels.
 
A CCP manager noticed an unusual and unexpected dip in reported customer service performance. Knowing that the staff had remained consistent during that time period, the project team made a list of possible reasons for the lower scores. They then divided the list into items that could be controlled by the CCPs, such as types of questions asked, and those that were uncontrollable. What they discovered was that a seemingly minor policy change made by the client was adversely affecting the CCPs ability to completely resolve certain customer problems. This information was then proactively shared with the client and helped clarify how corporate decisions can impact customers. This insight ultimately led to a reversal of the policy.
 
Your customer care outsourcer should be willing to test different service program components as well. For example, we recently ran a pilot program for a client to test the result of asking the question “Have we resolved your issues to your satisfaction?” At the end of the test, it was determined that satisfaction scores did increase with this question because customers had a chance to fully explore the problem and resolution before the call concluded.
 
And that’s what companies need – a flexible partner with the ability and desire to create custom evaluation programs combining both productivity and quality metrics. Your customer service organization should have proven processes in place to provide you with insight into customer behavior and allow you to evaluate performance at micro or macro level.
 
Overall Value
While I’ve spent a lot of time talking about performance metrics, it is important to point out that companies must evaluate all aspects of an organization before selecting a customer care outsourcing partner. While the performance of employees and response of customers are indisputably critical, other factors such as operational efficiency, training effectiveness, recruiting ability, and retention rates all contribute to delivering the best overall value for your investment. A customer care center willing to go the extra mile to analyze trends, dive deep for solutions and continually improve processes will elevate the level of service for both your company and your customers.
 
Rob Duncan is Chief Operating Officer of Alpine Access, Inc. a Denver, Colorado-based provider of call center services using home-based customer service and sales employees. Alpine Access clients include Office Depot, the IRS and a number of Fortune 100 financial institutions.


Edited by Greg Galitzine


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