In recent years, the contact centre has transitioned from being a burdensome cost centre, evolving into a highly desirable profit centre that no company can be without. However, the traditional contact centre metrics are often still in place, which may not be driving the right behaviours.
For example, historically, it was quite the norm to measure contact centre agents by the time to answer, the number of calls handled, call length, call abandonment rate and other such quantitative key performance indicators. Whilst these metrics still have some relevance, they do little to indicate whether the customer experience was good or even whether the customer’s question was answered satisfactorily.
In more recent times, contact centres have included measures such as first contact resolution rate, call transfer rate, average handle time, the average time in queue, average after call work time and so on. While these newer metrics might indicate whether or not the customer was satisfied, there’s still no evidence that the customer is likely to purchase more in the future, or, if not, any insight into why they churned.
