Customers want answers to their questions conveniently and quickly, and the most important attribute of customer service is fast response times. For quick solutions, customers prefer the self-service options that companies currently offer. Self-service tools can include websites, chatbots, SMS, and IVRs.
Businesses using CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) gain better visibility into customer interactions across channels.
When customers ask a business question, 3/4th of the population will check the website first. This is a clear signal that customers want to get an answer on their own before contacting your business. Businesses have the ability to optimize their websites so that answers to frequently asked questions are readily available and easy to find. If your website is down, there are additional tools your business can deploy to address customer service needs before moving on to a support request or call.
Now What is the role of CCaaS in customer service success? CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service refers to a cloud-hosted platform facilitating comprehensive customer interaction management spanning diverse communication modalities including telephony, email, chat, and social media. This solution provides on-demand scalability and versatile resources, empowering enterprises to optimize customer support, operational processes, and agile responsiveness to dynamic market demands.
Top Performance metrics to evaluate
Customer satisfaction
Let’s start with perhaps the most important metric right now:
Customer satisfaction. Remember that 61% of customers will switch companies after only one bad experience, and 84% of customers say the experience your company provides is as important as your product or service.
To track customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll need to track:
Customer satisfaction with your service:
Post-interaction surveys are a good way to gather this information. You can even automatically ask customers to rate your service after a live chat or call.
What customers are not satisfied with:
If your customers are unhappy, you need to know why. Use CSAT surveys to gather information about what your customers want to change in your support strategy.
Most CCaaS providers offer tools to collect CSAT scores from your customers, or you can find many of these tools implemented in CRM software.
Agent Productivity
Agency productivity is an umbrella metric to keep an eye on in the CCaaS world. As more and more contact center tools continue to roll out workforce management and tracking solutions, the concept becomes easier to follow.
Top Productivity metrics to evaluate
Average processing time:
AHT measures the time an agent spends on a call or conversation. Many contact center agents are also rated on “resolution speed” because contact centers want to reduce call wait times and increase retention.
Agent usage rate:
Agent hours worked divided by agent availability tells you agent utilization rates. For example, if an agent is online for six hours during an eight-hour shift, their utilization rate is 75%.
Average first response time:
This refers to the time it takes for an agent to answer a call, respond to a live chat message, or accept a video chat request. Quick response is key to making sure your agents are as productive as possible.
Many contact center systems will automatically track many of these metrics. If you notice that your agent’s productivity levels are low, it could be a sign that you need to take action to support your agency. Investing in better CCaaS tools to help your agents respond to issues faster can be a good start. You should also research ways to engage your agents on a regular basis.
Case Deflection
Case redirection or deflection is the speed at which your customers can find answers to their questions on their own, without having to contact your support team through a call or staff-led chat . For example, you can measure case deviation on your site by tracking user visits that include searches and clicks on results, but don’t end with an upgrade to a support ticket or additional awareness.
Another example of a case transfer is when a user visits your support page, asks a question, gets recommended articles, and then leaves without submitting a request. This is often a sign that the information you provide meets their needs.
Dropout rate
Consider your abandonment rate, i.e. how often customers visit your self-service page and quickly leave it, when you want to understand how well self-service tools meet customer demand.
Content Relevance
Content relevancy is directly related to abandonment rate. Is the content you provide customers on your website or in your chatbot useful? Otherwise, you should expect your dropout rate to be higher. If the content is relevant, you will see customers clicking on the information provided and satisfied with the response. Content relevancy can also be measured by the number of articles a customer has to click through before finding the answer they need. You can also determine what to show first based on those clicks.
Recontact Rate
If your customers review the same content or ask the same questions in your self-service tools, consider reorganizing your resources to better meet your customers’ needs in your cloud contact center.
Cost Per Contact
With the implementation of self-service tools, you may find that your cost per contact with a direct agent increases, while your cost per contact, including interactions self-service, is reduced. When you only route escalations to direct agents, the time it takes to resolve these issues can potentially increase. This means that the number of real human interactions decreases and therefore the cost per call increases. However, if you factor in the efficiency of self-service contacts, which means you can serve more customers because you don’t need the help of direct agents, the cost per Your contact will drop.
Call Volume Trend
Like cost-per-contact, the number of calls will go down if your self-service options are active. As call volume decreases, your support staff’s bandwidth increases to handle the most urgent customer requests.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction should be one of your top self-service KPIs. The good news is that it’s easier to deliver surveys to customers using self-service technology than to rely on them to fill out forms after the call. Most of the time you will only hear negative experiences in these situations, while with self-service you are more likely to get a clearer and more objective picture of the service experience. Through a chatbot or post-call IVR survey, you can gather feedback on your content, services, and technology to ensure your self-service options are providing the right quality of care.
Cost savings
In addition to measuring cost per contact, measuring the overall cost savings for your contact center and end-to-end support activities demonstrates the value of implementing self-healing options service. The biggest cost to any contact center is human talent. Self-service helps automate interactions to reduce the need to hire agents to keep up with business growth. Additionally, self-service allows existing talent to focus on priority interactions.
