Customer satisfaction is make-or-break for any organization, especially a call center. If you don’t keep your customers happy, you’ll soon find that your customer base is dwindling and the bottom line is shrinking.
However, with 93 percent of support teams agreeing that customer expectations are higher than ever, maintaining customer satisfaction can be tricky. To keep them loyal and stay ahead of your competitors, you’ve got to deliver exceptional customer experience.
A set-and-forget CX strategy won’t do it either. To keep up with industry trends, customer demands, and changing technology, you need to choose the right QA metrics. That’s why we’ve pulled together 11 essential contact center KPIs that measure customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a measure of how pleased customers are with the products or services provided by a business, and whether or not their expectations are met. In a contact center, this is typically determined by how quickly and effectively the agent is able to resolve the customer’s issue.
To calculate CSAT, most companies use a survey with a simple scoring system (e.g. 1 to 5) and express the result as a percentage. While it may seem basic on the surface, CSAT can provide insights into customer loyalty, likelihood of churn, service issues, and more. In fact, 62 percent of CX leaders regard customer satisfaction as their most important metric.
KPIs (key performance indicators) are metrics that measure the success of a call center—an essential aspect of any quality assurance program. You can use KPIs to evaluate agent performance, measure customer experience, and understand how well your call center is meeting its objectives.
Customer satisfaction can be the difference between success and failure. A great customer experience can cement loyalty, drive growth, and even attract new customers. On the other hand, weak CX can damage your brand image, drive customers away, and cost you money.
60 percent of business leaders say that high-quality service improves customer retention. It might seem obvious but it’s worth repeating—happy customers will keep coming back. If you make them feel valued in every interaction, they’ll repay the favor and retention will soar.
There’s no business without customers. Building relationships is essential to driving revenue and ensuring long-term profitability, with 93 percent of customers more likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent service.
High customer satisfaction is essential to building your reputation and strengthening brand loyalty. 75 percent of customers have recommended a company based on excellent customer service, making word of mouth as powerful a marketing tool as any.
When an employee is making a positive impact on customers, it’s likely that they’re empowered and engaged in their work. This means less stress, improved morale, and a lower chance of churn.
Quickly and accurately resolving customer queries is the bread and butter of a call center. If customers are happy, then it’s highly likely that your team is productive. First call resolution is a key metric here, with 52 percent of customers ranking it as the main factor in their CX.
80 percent of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. In a saturated marketplace, offering a better CX than your competitors could be a real difference-maker.
Customer satisfaction is an underlying factor in nearly every aspect of revenue generation. Happy, loyal customers spend more, positive word-of-mouth brings in new opportunities, and more productive agents have a greater bandwidth for upselling and cross-selling.
With 86 percent of consumers prepared to leave a brand after just two poor experiences, it’s more important than ever to prioritize customer service KPIs. Not only can they help increase customer satisfaction, they can also show how your call center is performing against customers expectations.
These metrics matter for everything from CX to revenue generation, so it’s important to understand what KPIs are, and how to pick the right ones for your call center. If you stay focused on your goals and keep the following tips in mind, you’ll be able to identify the most relevant KPIs for your business.
There are many different customer satisfaction KPIs you can monitor and, depending on your business aims, some may be more relevant than others. However, there are some metrics that always matter for call centers. That’s why we’ve chosen the top eleven KPIs that measure customer satisfaction, agent performance, and call center performance.
Understanding these customer service KPIs can greatly enhance call center processes and customer satisfaction scores. If you prioritize these important KPIs, improving the customer experience will become second nature.
To improve customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll need to take a multi-pronged approach involving agents, QA management, technology, and more. While the strategies that work for one company won’t necessarily work for yours, there are some tried-and-tested approaches that frequently get results.
If you want to make improvements to your contact center’s customer experience, you first need to understand what’s working—and what isn’t. By conducting regular reviews of both agent performance and operational processes, you can pinpoint your weak spots.
To do this, you should track CX KPIs like CSAT and NPS, as well as productivity metrics such as average handle time, first call resolution, and abandonment rate. You can then dig into this data with reporting and analytics tools to understand what needs to change.
Simply onboarding your reps isn’t enough—training needs to be continuous and consistent to get results. Customer needs, industry trends, and call center tools are always changing. If your agents aren’t up to speed, they won’t be able to resolve issues fast and CX will suffer.
By delivering varied, ongoing training via one-on-one coaching sessions, visual materials, roleplays, and more, you can prepare your team for any customer query. Besides, 62 percent of agents want ongoing call center training opportunities anyway so it’s a win-win.
Customers don’t like sitting in a queue—physically or on the phone. Excessive wait times are frustrating and immediately put your call center on the back foot in terms of CX. To avoid this, you must ensure that you have sufficient staff to handle inbound call volume.
With reporting and analytics tools, you can forecast call volumes and build effective schedules, ensuring that you have adequate staff for peak times. You could also consider offering a callback option, so customers can be “in the queue” but still go about their day.
We mentioned agent training earlier, primarily focusing on hard skills and technical knowledge, but don’t forget about soft skills and emotional intelligence. At the end of the day, call centers are about human interactions so your agents need to be capable of empathy.
By encouraging your agents to develop their communication skills and show a genuine interest in the customer, you can better equip them to deliver a positive experience, even in tense situations with agitated customers.
Disengaged agents are 11 percent less likely to provide FCR and 14 percent more likely to make customers repeat information. Coincidentally, customers’ top service issues are “not getting issues resolved during first contact” and “having to repeat myself to multiple agents.”
Putting those numbers together, it’s clear that keeping agents engaged is essential for customer satisfaction. By fostering a positive workplace culture, you can improve morale, engage agents, and make sure that everyone in the organization feels valued.
77 percent of customers think that contact center queue times are too long. If your average wait time is high and average speed of answer is slow, customers will grow frustrated and abandonment rates will soar, putting a serious dent in your customer satisfaction scores.
By streamlining call center operations, you can give your the tools and resources to manage the inbound queue efficiently and ensure a clear process for assigning and handling calls. You can even conduct regular call center audits to identify any operational bottlenecks.
If you want to keep your customers happy, you need to always consider their needs ahead of everything else. This means taking a customer-centric approach and delivering a personalized experience at every touchpoint.
Today, 71 percent of customers expect personalized interactions and 76 percent get frustrated if that doesn’t happen. Using CRM data, agents can leverage demographic info and interaction history to customize their approach depending on the specific customer.
Speaking of customer needs, what better way to discover these needs than to ask your customers directly? By gathering feedback via surveys, social media, interviews, focus groups, and more, you can make informed changes to your CX, operations, and more.
With 38 percent of companies gathering customer feedback and doing nothing with the information, proper analysis and implementation can give you a competitive edge when it comes to delivering a positive customer experience.
Self-service options are available 24/7, offering your customers greater freedom while also easing the workload from inbound calls. This frees up your agents to focus on more complex queries that require a human touch, improving CSAT scores across the board.
Support tools like chatbots, knowledge bases, and FAQs could be a major factor in improving CX, with 81 percent of customers stating that they would like more self-service options, but only 15 percent expressing satisfaction with the tools currently available to them.
Quality assurance is key to maintaining high standards, both operationally and in terms of agent performance. By setting performance benchmarks and criteria, you can ensure that your agents are always adhering to correct processes and delivering excellent service.
With purpose-built QA software, you can monitor customer interactions, evaluate agent performance with scorecards, and use reporting and analytics to gather insights into customer behaviors, satisfaction levels, and the impact of your CX strategy.
For modern contact centers, an effective tech stack is key to delivering an exceptional customer experience. By implementing call center technology like AI, automation, chatbots, and more, you can speed up response times, reduce average handle time, and improve FCR.
Take interactive voice response (IVR), for example. Advanced IVR uses intelligent routing to quickly direct customers to the most suitable agent, significantly reducing waiting times and improving CX. These tools that minimize customer effort are key to improving satisfaction.
Keeping your customers happy is the key to success for your call center. If customer satisfaction starts to drop, you’ll soon find that the business is struggling too. Thankfully, with a proactive approach, you can meet rising customer expectations and blow the competition out of the water with streamlined operations and exceptional CX.
Using an all-in-one QA solution like Scorebuddy, you can assess every aspect of the customer journey and ensure top-quality service in every interaction. Evaluate agent performance with custom scorecards, dig into customer motivations with integrated business intelligence, and deliver targeted training with a fully featured learning management system.
