More brands choose to improve their overall customer experience by ensuring that their call center metrics are aligned with customers’ expectations. But, not every metric is customer-centric. Business operational costs must be considered too. That is why it’s crucial for call centers to strike a balance in their metrics.
Call centers need to understand their key metrics better to help their clients attain their business goals. This is what this article will tackle in detail today.
Empower Your Team
Call center representatives know the importance of meeting metrics for their own career development. However, your call center team should also understand the deeper meaning of key metrics for them to stay empowered. In this way, they’ll have a greater sense of control over difficult customer conversations and won’t take them personally.
Customer service representatives should know the impact of their behavior on the brand they’re representing when talking with customers. If they understand their key metrics better, then they will think more objectively than subjectively. This can be accomplished by empowering your team using reliable call center tools, such as tools offered on sites like https://www.aceyus.com/. These will help identify customer-centric success metrics with the Visionary User Experience (VUE).
Promote Excellent Customer Satisfaction
One of the key metrics of call centers is first call resolution (FCR). It involves resolving a customer’s query right at the first interaction, preventing the same customer from calling back or being transferred to another department for the same issue. Otherwise, the customer might be seeking validation from another representative or simply was not satisfied with the first solution offered.
Promote excellent customer satisfaction by meeting at least 74% first call resolution rate. Call centers should understand this metric for representatives to avoid doing the same mistakes that usually lead to low FCR rates and develop strategies to meet this metric, such as the following:
- Root Cause Analysis: Conducting a root cause analysis is a good practice. It’s performed for unresolved calls on first contact, which helps pinpoint inefficiencies and identify trends. Root cause analysis can help call centers in data-driven decision-making. It answers questions like, “Why was the customer’s call transferred to another department?” or “Why did the call escalate?”.
- Analyze Customer Contact Behavior: This is done to anticipate customer needs. Some tactics include creating customer profile through segmentation or dividing customers into groups and defining their group characteristics. Group customers according to the reason of the call and then check their common characteristics. Doing so will better prepare your call center team to deal with these types of customers the next time and hit a higher first call resolution rate.
Help More Customers
Another important call center metric is service level, which is a fundamental metric for effective contact center management. Service level refers to the answered calls percentage within a set number of seconds. It means that the faster call center agents answer calls, the higher the contact center’s service levels.
Service level indicates the accessibility of the call center to customers. A higher service level also means helping more customers. Along with good response time and first call resolution, a call center that manages to keep escalations and complaints down will have better service levels. These call center metrics are important to ensure that customers are really helped with their concerns and not only simply getting them off the line.
Retain More Clients
If your call center is performing well by meeting all key metrics, you’ll be more confident to show your portfolio to your prospect clients. Using the right tools, you can present your proposal and gain the client’s confidence to continue using your call center services.
Increase Work Productivity
It’s important for call centers to understand key metrics better to increase work productivity. If call center agents understand their metrics, they’ll have better work engagement. It will help streamline workflow to resolve issues creatively. Also, call center managers can develop more effective strategies for agents to attain greater autonomy, such as letting agents do their own style of interacting with customers.
Here are the other ways to increase work productivity in the call center:
- Provide call center agents access to real-time metrics.
- Provide call center agents with comprehensive data about the caller.
- Enhance the work environment.
- Think of trending call center solutions to help improve workflow.
- Provide rewards and incentives.
Conclusion
Call centers need to understand their key metrics to empower their call center representatives to meet customer and business expectations. Also, it will help promote better customer service for excellent customer satisfaction. Knowing how to attain a certain key metric is crucial in helping more customers and retaining more businesses that entrust their customer service to your call center.
