Summary
If you’re as convinced of a phone system's importance to client relations as we are, then you’ve probably:- put a call center in place for your company to manage incoming calls and maintain relationships with your clients- set up an efficient tool for managing these calls- selected (and trained) the people responsible for taking these calls- defined rules for client relationsThese steps are a good start, but they don’t quite cover everything. To be able to truly measure the efficiency of your customer service, it is essential to identify and monitor key indicators in your phone activity. We’ve explained these below:
Why track indicators?
Whether quantitative or qualitative, key performance indicators (KPIs) are indispensable for gauging the quality of your customer service. They allow you to follow developments in call processing and, by extension, your customers’ satisfaction.These indicators can also be used to motivate your team. You can set up customer satisfaction challenges, compensating your most highly performing employees, or fix response rate objectives for them. The choice of indicators will depend on these objectives.
The 5 principal customer service indicators to monitor
Answer rate
This KPI allows you to measure the availability of your support staff. It indicates the percentage of calls answered by an agent in relation to the total number of incoming calls, so is therefore an inverse of the rate of abandoned calls.
Queue time
Of the main customer service KPIs, the time calls spend queuing is the one that gives the best indication of your global service quality and the adequacy of your resources to client needs. In simple terms, it is the delay experienced by a caller before his call is answered. It can include time spent navigating the different options in your IVR as well as time spent waiting to reach a live agent. This wait time must be completed before problem resolution in order to calculate average treatment time.
Average call duration
Measuring average call time and comparing it among the members of your support staff is important to understanding your activity or identifying potentially problematic calls and agents who need to learn to better handle calls.
First Call Resolution
First Call Resolution (FCR) is the rate of problem resolution upon first contact. It reflects the performance of your support agents as well as the difficulties with problem resolution they may encounter, independent of their intent and actions. These indicators require connecting your call software to your helpdesk via a specific API or webhook, allowing incoming calls to be correlated with ticket resolution.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
The Net Promoter Score is a simple indicator that evaluates client satisfaction. It measures the likelihood that a client will recommend your company to someone else with such questions as “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?”According to their response, clients are placed into three categories:9 – 10: promoters7 – 8: neutrals1 – 6: detractors The Net Promoter Score is calculated using the following formula: NPS = % of promoters - % of detractorsFor NPS to be useful, it must be based on a Customer Success campaign. For example, you can send an automatic referral link to all of your promoters and call your neutral customers and critics to identify and resolve issues.
What tools exist to track these KPIs?
Wanting to track your activities is one thing, but if you have to generate the numbers yourself and enter them manually into a spreadsheet on a weekly or monthly basis, mistakes and lost time are inevitable. You’ll therefore need to choose the right tools for monitoring your KPIs easily and automatically. Your call center software must have a statistics function for call logs as well as calls in real time. Furthermore, it needs to integrate to your CRM or customer support tools so that refined data may be extracted on call processing and customer satisfaction. Don’t forget that one set of indicator data doesn’t mean much on its own. Only in the context of comparison (with competition or industry standards, for example) and developments over time will you obtain the information pertinent to the impact of your decisions on your customer service.
