During times of change — or in the event of the unexpected, like a natural disaster or security breach — ensuring customer satisfaction is a top priority, and measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your contact center is of the utmost importance.
So, how does this get done? Especially during “burst” events when you need to augment your resources to handle spikes in call volume?
No matter what you have going on, customers appreciate being acknowledged promptly and professionally, and assisted when they experience difficulties. Being able to meet the needs of your account holders can lead to greater ROI — more cross-sell opportunities, word-of-mouth referrals and future revenue.
When it comes to demonstrating ROI, there are four “big” core metrics financial institutions should measure to safeguard the benefits of account holder loyalty:
1.Customer Satisfaction (the big one!)
2.Efficiency
3.Call Quality
4.Offline to Online Conversions
Let’s dive deeper into each of these.
1. How to Effectively Measure Customer Satisfaction
Most contact centers employ a one-question customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) to glean how customers feel about the service they receive. The internal team then decides what the key performance indicators (KPI’s) will be. For example, do you want each customer to rate their experience at 5 or higher? 8 or higher? — and the tools you’ll need to gather the information, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or interactive voice response (IVR) technology.
Be sure to work closely with your contact center supplier on reporting and how this survey will be delivered.
2. Ensuring Contact Center Efficiency
Measuring KPI’s is particularly important when it comes to ensuring efficiency. Typical KPI’s here include:
- First call resolution
- Average wait time
- Average handle time (or time the contact center rep spends on the phone)
- Attrition rates of contact center agents
Like I said above, it’s up to you and your internal stakeholders to determine what KPI’s truly matter and are instrumental in ensuring your contact center’s success.
Just be careful not to get too focused on efficiency at the expense of customer satisfaction. After all, customers have the dollar value while efficiency can only maximize that dollar value.
And a reported 58% of customers will discontinue use of a brand following a bad customer service experience, with poor customer service costing US businesses $41 billion per year.
3. Quality of Calls
Call quality is different than measuring customer satisfaction, though they are closely related. If call quality is high, then customer satisfaction will be as well.
Call quality includes making sure that contact center representatives are not only answering calls but also answering them well.
Ways to measure the value these reps provide include:
- Reporting on one-call resolution
- Reporting on call abandonment
- Average speed of answer
4. Offline to Online Conversions — The Final Piece of the Puzzle
The fact that most brands are now highly digital means it isn’t enough to simply measure the ROI of the contact center itself. There are more ways to field account holder communications than ever: email, social, and web chat to name a few. It is useful for a financial institution to know if users are finding their way to the contact center from their digital interactions and, if so, the point of conversion.
A recent article in The Financial Brand states:
Paid search marketers are using this type of call tracking to measure their ROI… right down to the individual keyword. They can track when someone looks on Google for a home mortgage, then clicks on a paid search ad, hits the company website, and then finally makes a call. Without linking call data in this manner, there’s no way to measure marketing performance in terms of online and offline conversions.
By tracking where the calls come from, the contact center and the marketing teams can work hand-in-hand to create a well-rounded customer experience.
Measuring ROI has an added benefit of keeping contact center partners accountable to their objectives and aligned with business goals. Having clear targets not only motivates representatives to offer the best service possible, but it makes sure your customers get the brand’s “best foot forward.”
> Download Vericast’s “Ultimate Guide for Successful Contact Center Outsourcing”.
