Measurement is a fundamental requirement for success in basically every aspect of contact centers. The same holds for omnichannel metrics.
UPDATE: This writer totally forgot to credit the ICMI’s excellent article on contact center metrics for the inspiration of this piece. Many apologies! –Rogan Louwrens
First things first…
Before you get all measure-happy, we need to take a moment to talk methodology. Which is to say, there is a right way to use these metrics and a wrong way.
This’ll be quick, promise.
The wrong way: measure all your channels in isolation. This is worse than not measuring at all. Seriously – it’s a waste of time and it could lead you in entirely the wrong direction.
The right way: don’t do that. No but really: make sure you’re measuring consistently throughout the journey. That way you can judge the system as a whole and use words like ‘holistically’ (wait but don’t do that last one).
Anyway! Let’s get to that metric dance, shall we?
First-contact resolution
You know what people like more than getting a problem solved? Yes indeed: they like getting a problem solved quickly.
Now while research has shown that it’s the results that count most all things told, rate of first-contact resolution is probably the single biggest predictor of customer satisfaction. It’s something you can give your agents a giant pat on the back for, too – whether that pat on the back is a word of encouragement or a meal voucher or a bonus.
Make sure, as we said before, that you’re measuring first-contact resolution across channels. If you’re seeing some channels outstripping others by far, examine your policies and figure out whether you’re hamstringing channels.
What we mean is, are you giving your agents the same amount of power to get things done in every channel? We see a lot of centers that have a web chat option but they may as well give up, because all web chat can do is ask people to call – and all because they don’t have the power to make things happen.
This is a poor state of affairs, guys.
Contact quality
There really is no replacing a good team of QA staff. Because all the algorithms and ratings systems in the world can’t (yet, at least) come close to a quality assurance expert armed with the right rubric.
So have your QA staff – or outsource this if you don’t have any – examine at least a random sampling of interactions handled by every agent you have. Give them a checklist of things to look out for. The ICMI recommends:
- Appropriate greetings and call-script adherence
- Basic courtesy and professionalism
- Capturing the required customer data
- Giving customers info that’s both right and relevant
- Rate of first-contact resolution
- Accuracy (when recording data and call codes)
- Grammar and spelling in text
Figure out not only where agents have weak points, but in which channels those weak points tend to manifest most.
This will give you an absolute treasure trove of information.
Self-service accessibility
A big perk with a good omnichannel implementation is getting to offload a big chunk of costly effort onto self-service channels. But this is only a good thing if your self-service channels are, y’know, actually good.
So make sure you keep tabs on the whole journey, whether it touches your employees or not. Take IVR options as an example – are you checking in regularly on drop-off rates along the chain? If you have a knowledge base, are you looking to see if people are searching for articles that don’t exist (yet)?
Heat-map your online offerings. Find the places where people commonly make false starts. Look for the number of tickets generated from within a particular article. Ask your customers to score what you’re putting them through.
You get the idea, right?