Operating in what has been dubbed the “age of the customer,” virtually all businesses profess a rhetorical commitment to the customer experience. Many confirm plans to significantly boost their customer service investments. Success, however, continues to elude organizations. Few, for all their tireless, pricey efforts to improve the customer experience, are managing to optimize their workforce and better satisfy their customers.

Achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction through workforce-optimization technology is one of the top trends of 2014.

The Value of Metrics

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. An organization may use KPIs to evaluate its success, or to evaluate the success of a particular activity in which it is engaged.

  • Call center managers can’t effectively manage what they don’t measure: Tracking KPIs and other metrics in order to improve call center performance continues to be important. Understanding and benchmarking against these metrics is still the best way to maintain high standards of customer service.
  • As of last year, only 43 percent of call centers had a high level of understanding of KPIs. In 2014, it’s crucial to not only measure, but also to understand the metrics that matter most, including; First Call Resolution (FCR), Abandonment Rates, Average Handle Time (AHT), Average Speed to Answer (ASA) and Cost-per-Call.
  • These metrics are also relevant for creating benchmarks across multi-channel environments. For example, the Contact Center Satisfaction Index (CCSI) reports that self-service on a company’s website has the best First Call Resolution rate at 78 percent, while less impressive results come from chat and email. Call center managers must keep a keen eye on metrics across all mediums, and understand how and why these numbers differ.

Progression in Methods Used to Achieve Deeper Customer Engagement

This chart resulting from Forrester Research shows that when contact center technology was new, the focus was on efficiency. Contact rate and how many agents could be kept constantly busy were top selling points. Once managers felt they had achieved maximum efficiency in those areas, they turned their focus to the agents. How to achieve quality of calls, ensure adherence to industry regulations and business policies, and how to lower the turnover rate took the spotlight. The next step finally focused on achieving greater customer satisfaction. Determining the NPS (Net Promoter Score—who is likely to recommend your business), detecting emotion, and the percentage of FCR (First Contact Resolution) became guiding statistics that meant businesses had to survey customers. They told us what was important to them was how well we did with timeliness, repetition and channel shifting.

Deeper customer insight told us that, in order to optimize the workforce, we had to focus on all three areas: people, process, and technology.

Voice of the Customer

Many successful Call Centers are proactively capturing and analyzing customer service feedback to adapt to changing customer preferences and expectations. In 2014, more organizations will implement VoC (Voice of the Customer) programs that have the ability to capture feedback across a variety of channels, including social media, web surveys, focus groups and even emotion detection that analyzes how a person feels based on their tone of voice.

Forrester Research predicts annual growth of about 20 percent in the coming years for VoC. According to Jim Davies, Research Director at Gartner, it is “now being viewed as a must-have strategy.”

Focus on Quality

Many contact centers still depend on basic metrics, such as call duration and number of calls per hour, to determine how well their workforce is performing. Yet many traditional operational measurements are less relevant today. For example, when a contact center agent has been trained to help consumers fill out complex mortgage loan applications, what matters is not how quickly applications are completed, but that customer frustration and errors are minimized. If agents’ job responsibilities include upselling or cross-selling, a long call could be a successful call because it brought in revenue.

Customized Tools for Your Business

In addition to collecting standard operational metrics, enterprises must reassess what is important to their businesses in today’s context and put processes in place to measure that. For example, qualitative measures such as customer surveys might be the single most useful determinant of agent performance. Analytics solutions can cull through self-service statistics to determine how well the IVR or voice recognition system is supporting customers.

Many enterprises get useful information from automated ways to analyze text or speech. Others use tools that correlate results of outbound marketing campaigns with agent activity. As social media becomes a more common customer service channel, sifting through those interactions for relevant data is increasingly important, both to analyze customer complaints and understand positive customer comments. By prioritizing, routing, measuring and reporting social media traffic, and linking it to customer satisfaction, revenue generation or agent performance, enterprises can achieve a unique competitive advantage.

Contact Center Technology Maturity

Workforce Management and Quality Monitoring technologies are considered mature, and many contact centers are confident that they can benefit by moving them to the cloud or have done so already. Interaction analytics and enterprise feedback management are relatively new technologies used mainly by early adopters but growing in acceptance. Many companies are planning to implement more cloud-based technologies in the next year.

Which other contact center technology upgrades is your firm planning to implement in 2014? What will you keep on premise as you move other technology to the cloud? How would your response compare to the results of a recent online random survey?

If you choose to move your contact center to the cloud, would you:

  • Select the bundled WFO package offered by the cloud vendor – 31.6%
  • Stay with your on-premises WFO solution and connect it to the cloud – 24.8%
  • Chose a separate WFO cloud solution – 7.1%
  • Move a part of WFO ( e.g., Workforce Management) to the cloud – 36.5%

A 2013 Forrester Survey breaks down the types of workforce optimization technology business are considering adopting this year. How do your plans compare with what this survey shows? Client satisfaction goes hand-in-hand with workforce optimization. Capturing the Voice of the Customer is imperative to the customer experience. What experience is your customer having?

Acting on Customer Feedback

Capturing customer feedback is growing in importance for workforce optimization, but it’s what companies do with it that really distinguishes one organization from another. There are multiple ways and technology solutions for collecting feedback. Ultimately, the precise methods an enterprise uses are less important than that it takes action based on what it learns. Compare contact center technology companies while asking yourself, “What can you do for us and our customers now and as new trends become more important to our success?”