Q4 15 Metrics that Matter for Omnichannel Contact Centers By Lisa Durant Research Analyst, Nemertes Research Compass Direction Points: ± Traditional metrics still have their place Most organizations still measure traditional KPIs like average wait time, average handle time, abandon rate, etc. However, these KPIs alone no longer provide an adequate picture of contact center performance. Contact center leaders need to add qualitative metrics to understand customer experience. ± New metrics like Net Promoter Score and Transactional Net Promoter Score Emerging Relational Net Promoter Score evaluates a customer s relationship with an organization as a whole; Transactional Net Promoter Score measures the impact of an individual transaction. Contact center and customer service leaders can use them to measure which parts of their business have the most impact on customer experience, whether that s contact center or another business unit. ± Measure Performance in All Channels (and Between Channels) Nearly every organization now allows customers to contact it through non-voice channels. However, many do not measure agent performance or interaction quality in these channels. Contact center leaders must pay attention to and evaluate what is happening in these channels, including self-service channels that help prevent customers from having to call in at all. 1
Executive Summary While traditional, quantitative, time-centric Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like handle time, wait time, and first contact resolution still have a place in contact center management, it is important to also measure qualitative metrics like Relational or Transactional Net Promoter Scores. These qualitative metrics allow contact center leaders to truly understand customer experience and the contact center s impact on customers relationships with the organization. Moreover, since most contact centers now allow customers to interact with the organization through non-voice channels, it s important not to ignore performance and experience through these new channels. As self-service grows in importance, it is also crucial for contact center leaders to identify opportunities to enable customers to avoid calling the contact center at all and, instead, perform self-service through digital channels. The Issue Contact centers have been rapidly changing in recent years, but the metrics and KPIs used to evaluate their success have been much slower to evolve. Companies often engage customers through a variety of channels now, but still only monitor performance in voice. Moreover, within the voice channel, many customer engagement leaders still focus on time-centric KPIs like average wait time, handle time, and abandon rate. Many contact center leaders lack knowledge and awareness of emerging metrics like Relational and Transactional Net Promoter Score and crosschannel metrics that can help organizations differentiate their customer engagement strategy from the competition. Modern Metrics for Today s Contact Center The modern contact center often handles at least two or three different channels; yet, many contact center and customer engagement leaders have not yet expanded quality-monitoring programs to encompass these channels and other changes such as digital and mobile engagement outside of the contact center. Figure 1 shows the primary metrics contact center leaders use to evaluate success. Note that the Other box includes some of the above-mentioned newer metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, Call Avoidance, Quality Metrics, and also Sales- and Revenuerelated metrics 2
Figure 1: Primary KPIs Used to Evaluate Contact Center Success There s nothing wrong with monitoring these metrics, but they provide a twodimensional picture of a three-dimensional world. For example, an agent s handle time may be high; but what if the customer s experience was improved because the agent took extra time to assist him with an issue? Wait time may be low, but what if customers are calling in to handle simple issues that they would prefer to take care of via self-service? What if a customer abandons a call because he discovers a way to handle the issue via the web while sitting on hold? These qualitative and crosschannel questions can only be answered if contact center leaders are looking at more than just these old, traditional, quantitative voice-centric metrics. One measurement that some contact center and other departments touching customer experience use is Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a survey-based metric that asks customers to self report how they view their relationship with the asking organization in terms of a single factor: how likely they are to recommend it to others. Figure 2 shows contact center leaders plans to use NPS within the contact center (note that this does not account for the many organizations that use NPS outside of the contact center). 3
Currently Using 22.2% No Plans 72.2% Planning for 2015 5.6% Figure 2: Plans to Measure NPS in Contact Center Though the NPS question is familiar, using NPS scores effectively to make real changes in an organization is a bit trickier. The question above is geared towards measuring what is called Relational Net Promoter Score (rnps); it evaluates a customer s relationship with the entire organization. A contact center operations director at a very large global transportation company explains how his organization uses NPS. We measure NPS at the corporate level, but not in the contact center, he says. Part of the reason is that, when you look at the NPS questions, it is less about an individual interaction and more about an established relationship with the company or entity. While our contact center is important, if you include other experiences, the contact center has very little weight in the overall equation. So, for us, we focus on the top-2 box measure [i.e., measuring how often customers say they are highly likely to recommend the organization (9-10 on 10-point scale)]. It s also something that s very hard to explain to a front-line employee. Here s how you calculate. Here are promoters and detractors. It s hard for them to grasp and feel like they make a difference. However, it can sometimes be more important to understand the impact of an individual transaction on a customer s relationship with and view of a company. That s where an even newer metric comes in: Transactional Net Promoter Score (tnps). tnps adds the qualifying question What is the primary reason for you giving this [NPS] rating? It is often presented to a customer immediately after a specific interaction so that the rating can be tied to that transaction. For example, a customer 4
may receive an email survey asking these questions immediately after calling into the customer service line. This allows one to measure the impact of that call on the customer s view of the company. As mentioned above, NPS is often measured even outside of the contact center at multiple customer touch points (e.g., in-person branch or store experiences, after travel on a company s transportation service, etc.). By tying NPS to specific interactions, one can measure an individual experience s impact. tnps makes the most sense to use when the individual transaction is highly important. For example, tnps can be highly useful in financial services (e.g., home sales, insurance claims, wealth management), professional services (e.g., working with a lawyer), or even healthcare (e.g., a nurse line). In these instances, the transaction with the individual is highly important to the customer and, ultimately, also heavily influences that customer s relationship with the organization. On the other hand, tnps does not make sense to use when the transaction is routine or when the customer is looking for self-service (e.g., checking bank balance, refilling a prescription). Implementing rnps is fairly simple; it basically requires surveying a company s customer base through email, online form, or another survey system. Surveys can be sent on any desired schedule since rnps measures a customer s relationship with the brand and is not based on any one interaction. It can be more difficult to implement tnps as it requires tying surveying to specific interactions and having a way to tie customers and their touch points to survey data. tnps can be collected via phone call, IVR, or survey. Customer engagement leaders must first be able to pinpoint when high-impact interactions occur (e.g., an in-person purchase) and then reach out through one of these mediums to collect tnps data, which must then be analyzed quickly. Company leaders must then be prepared to respond quickly to tnps results by making changes. Improving Customer Experience by Helping Customers Avoid the Contact Center Sometimes, the best way to improve a customer s experience with the contact center is to make it so that he never has to interact with it at all. As self-service becomes more pervasive, customers are continually looking to be able to carry out more research and activities on their own. While self-service often happens outside of the contact center, it s still important to measure and account for what s taking place there, which can be thought of as No-Call Resolution or call avoidance. The idea behind tracking call avoidance is to monitor activity in self-service channels and continually look for ways to improve the experience by identifying frustration points and new opportunities to self-serve. This becomes increasingly important as more organizations are adopt a philosophy of enabling customers to answer their 5
own questions, interact with an organization, or perform self-service through digital channels rather than having to call into the contact center. One way to identify new opportunities for self-service is through measuring the amount of effort it takes customers to resolve specific types of issues. One way of doing this is by using a Customer Effort Score (CES), which asks customers to self-rate the effort they had to expend to accomplish their goals. As with NPS, CES is a surveybased metric that can be administered after a specific interaction or transaction to tie it to a specific event. It can be applied to any customer touch points and can be used to identify operational issues, training opportunities, and customer frustration points. It can even be used in internal-facing contact centers to pinpoint topics of interest to add to shared knowledge bases, or opportunities to distribute notifications about frequently encountered questions. Figure 3 shows contact center leaders plans to use CES within the contact center. Figure 3: Plans to Use CES in Contact Center While CES can be a helpful measurement to take, it is only useful alongside other means of understanding the root causes determining the level of customer effort required. A VP at a large media organization that measures customer effort explains: If you focus on effort to change effort without understanding what s really driving it and what needs to be done to change the customer experience, then you re doing it wrong, he says. You have to know what s affecting the effort (e.g., IVR, agent knowledge). We go back and look at our policy and processes and see if we can change those so that we re not just trying to unnecessarily improve customer effort score without paying attention to the rest of the business. 6
This is, of course, true for any metric: it is important to do more than measure a number. It s also necessary to monitor and evaluate underlying causes and make changes as necessary to see real impact on the organization. Accounting for Non-Voice Channels in a Digital Age Non-voice channels are often neglected. It seems that in the rush to enable multichannel customer engagement, many contact center leaders simply turned on those channels without ever ensuring that they were accounted for in reports. This is catching up to them, and now many are trying to understand how to begin measuring quality within these channels. This is not a small or isolated issue; multi-channel engagement is widespread and no longer a new concept. Figure 4 illustrates the channels typically engaged in today s contact center. Figure 4: Channels Engaged in the Contact Center While communication through non-voice channels is inherently different than voice engagement, sometimes it makes sense to start with what is familiar. Many of those who are measuring performance in non-voice channels often begin by measuring the same things in their text-based channels as they do in voice. They then expand to include metrics that do not make sense in a voice context (e.g., number of simultaneous conversations an agent handles). It s really similar to how we evaluate a call, explains a VP at a large media and publishing company. We measure average chat session time, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, and the number of interactions being handled concurrently. We 7
evaluate agents performance and allow concurrency to increase or decrease based on what the overall scorecard looks like. When beginning to measure even traditional metrics in non-voice channels, it is important to avoid creating data silos. Maintain a central data repository rather than measuring performance in each channel individually. Once this initiative has begun, begin to analyze how quality measurement needs to differentiate across channels. Text-based channels often lead to a different style of interaction that can sometimes be more casual than a phone call. This organization s VP continues, We also have a quality program that is different than voice, because we do allow the agents some leeway to match the customer s pace and style of communication. We don t allow them to talk with emojis and abbreviated speech, but we allow them to be more casual if the customer is also being casual in the conversation. It makes it a bit harder to run the quality program, but I don t care about it being harder: I want the customer to feel good. In a multi-channel or omnichannel environment, it s also important to track how interactions pass between channels. While omnichannel (where information about the history of a customer interaction follows the interaction as it moves across channels) is a goal, no organization wants to increase the number of times that customers must jump between channels. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the number of times and ways that a customer must interact with the company to resolve an issue or accomplish a goal. Time in motion [time spent across channels] is emerging as a cross-channel measurement and experience-tracking tool for us, explains one director at a very large financial services organization that measures not just how often an interaction is transferred but how that affects the entire customer journey and how long a person spends across all channels. It allows us to look at the breadth and depth of the interaction. And, of course, survey-based metrics like rnps and tnps can be tied to non-voice interaction. Presenting customers with a tnps survey after a chat conversation or email interaction allows contact center leaders to evaluate how well customers are able to resolve issues in those channels and also see those channels broader impact on customers feelings towards the company. Conclusion and Recommendations While traditional KPIs like average wait time, average handle time, and abandon rate still have a place in the contact center, organizations that wish to differentiate their customer-engagement strategies from the competition must look beyond these quantitative metrics. IT and operations leaders should add emerging qualitative 8
metrics such as Transactional Net Promoter Score, and cross-channel metrics that evaluate performance in digital channels, as well as focus on enabling self service. Nemertes recommends the following best practices:! If already surveying customers, consider adding a qualitative metric such as Net Promoter Score or Transactional Net Promoter Score. If using tnps, ensure timely measurement and quick response to results through making changes based on customer feedback.! Consider adding Customer Effort Score to immediate post-interaction surveys to help identify opportunities for self-service and agent training.! Launch a quality assurance program that includes evaluating agent performance in every channel that the organization engages.! If struggling with how to start evaluating performance in non-voice channels, begin by measuring familiar metrics: handle time, wait time, etc.! Ensure multi-channel metric data is kept in a centralized data system; avoid creating data silos by measuring performance separately in disparate systems. About Nemertes Research: Nemertes Research is a research-advisory and strategicconsulting firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. You can learn more about Nemertes Research at our Website, www.nemertes.com, or contact us directly at research@nemertes.com. 9