Are Your Customer Service Metrics Customer-Centric or Self-Centric? (Why you can’t be afraid to ask) Part 2

In my last blog, we discussed how approaching your business from the perspective of the customer and what matters to them will better position your agents to foster great customer experiences. In Part 2 of our 3 part Customer Service Metrics series, we dive into the importance of customer support availability and which metrics to measure.

Design customer support from the customer’s perspective.

When you’re dealing with legacy infrastructure and heavy investments, it can be easy to fall back into an attitude that customers will just have to contact you by the channels you decide to offer. That worked 20 years ago.

Today’s customers are, for the most part, channel agnostic, meaning they use whatever channel they prefer in the moment: phone, email, text, live chat, messaging, social channels. Preferences are also situational and change for individuals based on where and when they need to communicate. They expect to be able to contact you on their preferred channel, and further, they expect your organization to fully understand and be onboard with that expectation. If you don’t? They let everyone know. They also leave.

Customers have choices today and whenever customers have choices, they hold the power. You must meet their expectations. It’s not even a nice-to-have anymore, omnichannel is table stakes.

At Five9, we get a lot of questions about how to deliver on so many channels and how to keep pace with evolving technology. It takes continuous investment in training to keep teams updated - which is one reason we advocate having an abstract layer of technology that can serve as a buffer between multiple, changing channels and your contact center platform.

Scrutinize what you’re measuring.

Like I mentioned with AHT, most organizations are also using Net Promoter Score, Relationship Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score. These are all designed to obtain direct feedback from customers who are willing to provide it. They give you a high-level view on customer sentiment.

Pay attention to what you are measuring and whether it is truly telling you how the customer is experiencing your customer support delivery. Take a good look at your KPIs, and your agent service level objectives (SLAs), too. What drives productivity and efficiency, may not be driving a great customer experience. Qualitative measures are of greater value in discerning customer sentiment than only quantitative measures.

Tune in next week for the final installment of our Customer Service Metrics series!