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Feb 13 2019 Customer Focused Measures To Keep In Mind

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You’ve taken the first step and moved a self-service/digital deflection customer service model for your contact center. You put together a sophisticated set of checks and caller-driven options to respect your customer’s time.

How do you know they are working? Are they yielding the results you desire and/or expect?

The only way to know is to measure.

For many years, containment was considered the benchmark of IVR effectiveness. Containment makes no qualitative statement on the customer’s journey, such as NPS, or CSAT. Basically, containment tells how many calls did not route to an agent. From a cost saving perspective, that number may be all you need to know.

Generally, though, you want to review a handful of financial and customer-focused measures. The following are some items that you will want to understand:

Containment rate is the percentage of calls that remain in the IVR. This is not a qualitative measure. A caller disconnecting within the IVR looks the same as a caller who solves her issue within the IVR.

Completion rate is the percentage of calls that are actually completed. Calls are considered completed when the caller is able to complete their inquiry within the IVR.

Time spent before agent is the average time that is spent prior to transferring the call to an agent. This time includes any data gathering to identify the caller and caller’s purpose, as well as any effort expended attempting to resolve an issue via available self-service tools.

Caller satisfaction is a qualitative measure achieved by capturing a self-assessment of the caller’s overall pleasure with the call and/or its outcome.

Ability to resolve issue within the IVR is a qualitative measure attempting to understand more why a caller drops out of the IVR. There are a few reasons:

  1. Resolved the issue in the IVR
  2. Needed to interact with an agent to resolve issue
  3. Some external factor, such as a door bell, incoming phone call, etc.

The qualitative measurements that separate Ability to resolve within the IVR from less qualitative measures, such as Containment Rate identify the caller’s applied success. All disconnects within the IVR contribute to a positive Containment Rate. Only disconnects within the IVR that solve the caller’s problem, or achieve the caller’s intent, register as a positive entry for resolved within the IVR.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a measure of the likelihood of promoting my business based on this transaction.

CES (Customer Effort Score) is a caller-entered measure reflecting the relative ease of achieving desired results for this transaction.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) is a caller entered measure indicating how satisfied or dissatisfied the caller is with the current transaction.

Beginning to capture these measures and review them on an aggregate basis will let you start to get a view into how your contact center automation/digital deflection efforts are proceeding. Over time, you will be able to tune the measures to make them more targeted to meet your needs and effective at identifying opportunities for improvement.

Many times, it is helpful to engage a third party to assist you in establishing and interpreting results of your measurement efforts.