2 minutes on… Beating the rest

In the third of a series of quick insights, Mats Rennstam of Bright shares tips on achieving better performance.

We recently compared contact centre performance to several standard industry benchmarking reports.

We noted three general drivers behind the better performing companies:

1. Organisations that are serious about understanding and improving their performance are more likely to engage in benchmarking.
2. Most of the UK providers of benchmarking will give hands-on recommendations on how to narrow the gap to best practice.
3. Prioritisation. Most Customer Service Directors know their underperforming areas but are not sure on where to focus to get the maximum return on investment (ROI). Comparing yourself to top performers will help with this.

Beating the rest on… First Contact Resolution

The top performers all have a number of things in common:

• They all conduct systematic and ongoing monitoring of why customers are calling and are able to do continuous root-cause analysis.
• They have good knowledge management systems in place to support advisors; they offer more training.
• Their advisors have a mandate to solve more customer problems than at other companies.

Beating the rest on… Self-Service

The graph here shows our clients’ Self-Service Levels being higher than non-clients.

Is a higher level of self-service good, though? Yes, as long as it has a user-centred design and customers have the option to speak to a live agent; we see a correlation between high self-service levels and customer satisfaction. For simple queries, customers prefer fast and easy-to-use self-service solutions.

Beating the rest on… Call Duration

Despite more complex calls being handled due to higher self-service levels, and most organisations throwing out AHT as a target for advisors, call duration is still a management metric that can be used to lower costs. If you mix your productivity stats with customer satisfaction scores, you can do this without risking a backlash in CSAT.

The graph below shows an example of comparing call duration and product knowledge (as scored by customers) giving the contact centre manager a much better idea of who the true best advisors are, the ones that are efficient AND score high with customers.