Yesterday, I talked a little bit about the most important singular KPI for customer support and service. I touched on a myriad of others that were possibly candidates, before we settled on one key point and why it defined progress at a quick and simple glance. Well, this is your universal KPI, your skeleton key as it were. But, you can’t use this as your only measurement, you must stop and behold other measurements in all their glory and importance as well.
So now, I am going to review more than one KPI for customer support, and actually discuss them in more detail. I touched on these before, but now they get the serious attention they deserve, plus a bonus extra one, because I talked myself blue about customer opinion last time.
First, as I mentioned before, was first call resolution. You must remember that sometimes this is not a possible outcome of a call. There are situations such as ongoing trial to solve a problem expected to be like this, or ongoing handling of arrangements or inquiries that cannot be done in a single call.
So, it’s not the KPI, but it’s an important one, because of a multitude of reasons. First, it improves efficiency by keeping agents available to handle more volume of calls. Second, it uses less time for the customer, which depicts you as convenient – a respected virtue in this new century.
Next, we have the importance of quality assurance results, which are hard to measure. I talked about how abstract and subjective this is, but that doesn’t make it a less important metric source overall. You can’t listen to every call everywhere, but you can use the computers to get a good random sampling, and to flag troubled calls for review.
This actual recalling of incidents helps pinpoint problems and improve service in the future. Error detection, diagnosis and correction is important in the business world!
Finally, let’s talk about outreach success off of the call center. How many alternate fully functional channels are you using, such as help desks, email, forums, IM systems, or self service systems? The more of these you use, with results coming in, the more efficient and convenient you will be which is, again, incredibly respected in this new age.
With this outreach, people can deal with their problem in a myriad of ways. For example, if I have an issue with my cable going out, I can dial them on my android phone, I can contact them via help desk online, or I can use the phone’s internet to tweet them and go “fix my cable kthanxbye”. That’s convenience in quintessential form, and more businesses need to embrace it. So the rate of integration and success of application of this is an important KPI for customer support.
In the future, customer support is going to have to change its very nature, to remain functional in the new society. These metrics are a good way to see how well you are tagging along with the steady onward trot of progress. Don’t be a straggler, here there be dragons!
