Category: Customer Experience

To help businesses explore new demands in the CS industry and prepare for growth, CXM is hosting an insightful webinar in collaboration with Freshworks. They analyzed 107 million support interactions to uncover the elements crucial for delightful customer service. Speed emerged as the most important factor to improve customer satisfaction and our guests for the…
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You know that customer service is the backbone of your organization. Knowing where you stand with your customers and proving that value to stakeholders requires carefully crafted call center reporting that directly aligns with your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Excel Spreadsheets won’t cut it anymore. Your executive team and call center agents need easy-to-digest, visual data that can help to inform their decisions and actions.
This is where organizing your contact center metrics into custom reports comes into play.
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
What is a call center report?
We’ve all suffered through dry presentations featuring data that is hard to tie to everyday actions and goals. To clearly depict achievements and opportunities, your contact center metrics should be displayed in a visually appealing way that clearly defines your achievements.

Call center reporting is more than just showing your stats. Custom reports need to meet your unique organizational goals by providing metrics that represent your values and tell the story of your team’s impact. #Fonolo #CallCenterClick To Tweet

By leveraging the wealth of data available in your call center software’s online reporting tools, you can keep a close eye on the productivity, performance, and quality of your overall customer service offering.
Some of the key metrics that you might choose to include in your report may detail customer satisfaction, hold times, inbound calls, agent productivity, and call resolution.
But the way you present these stats can make all the difference between showing numbers and graphs and telling a story that can help your operations improve. The first step is knowing the difference between a report and the analytics within it.
The difference between reporting and analytics.
Analytics act as the backbone of your reports and daily data. These are the stats related to things as they’re happening, and the raw data that’s gathered can then be used to inform your call center reporting. Your report will turn that raw data into KPIs to help track and measure performance over time.
Here are some examples of how raw data can inform reporting:

Hold time is an analytic that informs reporting on abandonment rates and service level.

Call length is an analytic that informs reporting on First Contact Resolution (FCR).

Number of calls is an analytic that informs reporting on agent occupancy rate.

Call driver is an analytic that informs reporting on sources of customer issues.

Analytics inform your custom reports, but your reporting will break it down into easily digestible and accessible tidbits of information that can be easily actioned.
Important call center KPIs.
You will want to regularly gather some of the more basic analytics, such as the number of calls your contact center receives each day and the average time duration of those interactions. But in order to truly display this data to company stakeholders, you’ll want to ensure that they are connected to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We’ve included some below to get you started.
First contact resolution (FCR).
This is the percentage of interactions where your agents are able to resolve a customer’s issue during the first call, chat, or email. A high first contact resolution (also known as first call resolution) means your agents are knowledgeable and highly effective in their work. On the other side of the spectrum, a low percentage means that there is room for coaching and training to improve your agents’ product and service knowledge.
Adherence.
This metric measures whether your agents are managing and adhering to their schedules. You can calculate it by taking the total time a call center agent is available and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work. The resulting percentage will help you to identify whether your agents are where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there. Adherence relies on status reports built into your call center software such as offline, available (idle), wrap up, etc. and as a total percentage for your contact center it directly informs workforce management ROI.
Customer feedback.
90% of customers believe that organizations should provide the ability for customers to provide feedback. Knowing how your customers feel about the service they received, and providing an opportunity to submit written feedback on the experience, gives a real human element to include in your reporting. Collecting this information can range from a simple scale (think “rate the quality of service you received today!”) to a more formal net promoter score survey.
Abandonment rate.
If hold times are too long and customers are abandoning calls, or they abruptly end the call or interaction, this can be directly attributed to customer frustration and a high rate should be seen as a red flag.
4 Tips to Reduce Call Abandonment in Your Contact Center
Agent occupancy.
Idle time can be costly when it comes to contact center management. To calculate agent occupancy rate, divide the workload (busy) hours by staff hours. A higher rate means less idle time. More idle time could mean low engagement among your agents, but zero idle time indicates your contact center runs the risk of agent burnout. Unhappy call center agents are not going to continuously meet your standards of service, so finding the happy medium in agent occupancy is key to overall contact center success.
How to Calculate Occupancy Rate in a Call Center
Service level.
This is the average overall time it takes for your customers to receive service, starting from the moment they reach out to your contact center. This includes time spent on hold, and you may also include the number of calls during a specific time period. Common SLA’s for first touch interactions on phones/chats are under an hour, while emails may be 24 hours.
Call transfer rate.
A high call transfer rate could signal the need for a better routing system, or more empowered agents that can handle tasks without routing to a supervisor. Either way, this is definitely a KPI that you will want to align with to ensure that you’re offering a great customer experience.
What is Call Routing in a Contact Center?
Quality score.
This metric shows how agents are performing based on a series of metrics that are important to your company. Quality Assurance scores help drive training/coaching initiatives throughout the year on both a group and individual level.
Tips and best practices.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel! Your call center software often comes with reporting tools that you can use as a base to build off of.
When it comes to your reporting, you need to Digest, Report, Learn, Repeat. Don’t get set in specific reporting methods. As organizational strategies shift and change based on customer demand, so should your contact center reporting strategies and KPIs.
Do things, tell people. Once your reports are organized in an easy-to-digest manner, share them with everyone. Make your contact center a data-driven environment by sharing insights, wins, and opportunities with everyone from agents to executives.

TIP:
Fonolo Portal has analytics and insights built in to help you compile your call center reporting to help you make better informed decisions. Get more info here.
The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Feet on the street.

At the same time that air travel is becoming less favored by businesses, the world is more connected than ever before.

There are lots of organizations that want to do business internationally but might not be as eager to fly across the world to visit a factory or meet with a supplier. And so the pharmaceuticals, the software, the fabrics, the call centers, the chips—it becomes ever more difficult to truly understand how to source and produce the components that world-based products demand.

The expediter is local talent. They speak the language. They are retained by the company to join in on zoom calls and to do site visits if needed. The modern expediter provides something that’s more useful than ever: insight.

My friend Jojo does this in China. I’m guessing that there are others who do it in many other countries around the world, but they’re not easy to find.

I’ll update this post next week with a list of folks who are now doing this new sort of work. Feel free to submit your info via this form if you’d like to be included.

The seventh edition of the Gulf Customer Experience Awards is now open for entries! Companies from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar will have the chance to showcase their outstanding business initiatives and earn recognition for the best CX initiatives in the GCC. GCXA will celebrate the incredible work of CX professionals…
The post Gulf Customer Experience Awards in 2022 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

I am looking for examples of the costs of client onboarding going wrong. In particular I was wondering if you could share any cases when the sales team overpromised and then this caused challenges when onboarding a client. At a friend’s company a sales rep missold a CRM integration that they didn’t support and his company almost got sued. Do you often have trouble keeping track of all the things the sales team have promised? I am also open to other stories of things going horribly wrong with client onboarding. I find learning from other people’s mistakes can help me evade the same pitfalls.
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Ooma, Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, announced it is now offering the UJET contact center solution to Ooma Enterprise customers, giving them a single source for Ooma’s unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and UJET’s contact center as a service (CCaaS) cloud-based platforms. UJET, Inc. is the world’s only cloud contact center platform for smartphone era customer experience (CX) management, unifying the handling of inbound and outbound contacts across sales, marketing, and support. Powered by the world’s largest elastic CCaaS tenant, at up to 22,000 agents globally, UJET is trusted by customer-centric enterprises to orchestrate customer experiences that are predictive, contextual, and conversational. Ooma Enterprise is a robust UCaaS platform with open APIs that enable partners and end customers to integrate unified communications into their mission-critical applications. Full article: https://www.ooma.com/press-release/ooma-to-offer-ujet-contact-center-solutions/
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Either you’re using time.

Or it’s using you.

You can watch the clock, but if you do, it’s watching you.

Clocks have an agenda. They aren’t a part of the human condition–they’re fairly recent. They enabled industrialism, and the very fact that they have an ‘alarm’ built in is a clue.

It’s definitely possible to put time to good use.

But if we’re without a compass and a goal, we can find it using us.

How much should you spend?

For just about everything, there’s level 1 (too cheap, total loss, all money and effort less than 1 is wasted) and there’s level 2 (spending ever more money to get not much more than investing at level 2 would have created.)

This rule applies to copyediting, to used cars, to the building of bridges and everything in between.

What’s the point of underspending on a software project? You merely end up with nothing but frustration.

And the gold-plated RFP that comes from deep within the bureaucracy is designed to avoid finger-pointing and blame, not to actually buy something that gets us a return–that might lead to even more waste.

Better to pay a little more than you should and get something you can use than pay too little and end up with nothing at all. Better as well to avoid paying a ridiculous amount for something that never satisfies–better to live without until you learn to see the curve.

Learning to see the curve–that’s the benefit of deliberate experience, well earned.

There are countless arguments about words that we often don’t understand the way someone else might.

Words like education, learning, merit, talent, skill, privilege, smart and successful.

They might not mean what we think they do.

Well-educated isn’t the same thing as smart.

Talents are different than skills.

Learning is not the same as education.

Successful isn’t the same as rich.

Agreeing on what we mean is a great place to begin.

The customer sits at the center of their own ecosystem of providers. You need to map their ecosystem to identify the best service experience opportunities. Most companies only look at their interactions with the customer, sometimes called “”company pathways””. They use this understanding to improve the interactions in the pathway from their own perspective. They think that is how the customer sees things. But that isn’t how the customer sees things at all. In addition to the interactions with the company, the customer interacts with many other actors to get the resources they need to get their jobs done. The customer looks at all the interactions in their journey and the different actors involved; at the ecosystem. This is a very different perspective. Full article: https://www.mycustomer.com/customer-experience/engagement/why-you-need-to-map-the-customers-ecosystem
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