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May 24, 2019 Thomas Cannon

7 Metrics to Track When Outsourcing Your Customer Service

7 Metrics Outsourced-1

Are you ready to outsource your customer service to a call center? Keeping track of customer satisfaction and loyalty is key to a superior customer experience (CX), and knowing the important metrics will help you achieve that - even if you are outsourcing to a call center.

These metrics will give your organization vital feedback on how your customer service strategy is performing and which aspects you can improve upon.

Thankfully, if you are outsourcing your customer service to professional and highly-skilled contact center (such as Advantage Communications), they will calculate a number of significant metrics on behalf of your company.

Despite this, it’s still important that you do some initial research to understand exactly what these metrics mean. This will allow you to understand exactly how your outsourced call center is performing and how they are offering return on investment (ROI) to your organization.

To help give your organization a quick taster into some important metrics, we have created a list of seven key metrics that your company should look out for when outsourcing your customer service to a call center.

1- First-call resolution (FCR)

First call resolution (FCR) is an essential metric for outsourced call centers. The term itself is pretty self-explanatory. It is a call center’s ability to address a customer’s needs in a single contact, eliminating the need for the customer to follow up on their issue.

Once FCR has been achieved the customer no longer needs to contact the call center again about their resolution and a customer service representative will not need to follow up on the query. The issue is completely resolved.

2 - Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is a traditional way to predict customer loyalty, and can measure how happy or satisfied a customer is with your business, your product or your customer service interaction.

A company's CSAT score is determined by asking customers a single question, a set of queries, or a long survey to assess their experiences - this is then quantified and expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100 percent. The higher the percentage the more satisfied your customers are with your company.

3 - Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a metric that has increased in popularity over the past decade, and the idea behind it is that the willingness to give a word-of-mouth recommendation is a good predictor of customer loyalty.

NPS aims to find out how likely a customer will act as an ambassador of your brand, recommending your product or services to other people within their network.

4 - Customer Effort Score (CES)

Ever wondered how much work a customer has to go to in order to purchase your products or services? That’s exactly what CES measures. This popular metric looks at the difficulty a customer faces when trying to buy from your organization.

5 - Call abandonment rates (CAR)

CAR measures the number of calls abandoned by customers before they even connect with a customer service agent. Higher CAR rates are an early warning that customers might be shifting their loyalties to one of your competitors.

6 - Average handle time (AHT)

While it’s good for agents to be conversational and friendly, your customers want fast and concise customer service that answers every single question they have as efficiently as possible. That’s why it’s important the average call time is neither too low nor too high.

Average handling time is a metric used to measure the amount of time required to handle a call, giving insight into how efficient your customer service processes are. This time includes talk-time, hold-time and hang-up time.

7 - Service level

Service level measures the number of calls that are answered within a given time. The traditional service level in the contact centre is to answer 80 percent of calls in 20 seconds. However, over recent times, many contact centers have made an effort to improve service levels by attempting to answer 90 percent of calls in 15 seconds.

Despite this, there are contact centers that are willing to let customers wait a little longer in the queue, to focus on giving them the best possible service once they reach an advisor.

That’s not to mention that service levels differ across channels. While we have highlighted the traditional service level for the voice channel, conventional service levels are different for other contact center channels?

Here is a list of the conventional service levels of six other contact center channels.

Email – 95% of emails answered within four hours (the better contact centers are aiming to respond to 80% of emails within 15 minutes).

Live chat – 80% of chats answered within 40 seconds.

Letters – 95% of letters answered within three days.

Social media – 80% of contacts answered within 20 minutes.

SMS/messaging apps – 80% of messages responded to within 40 seconds.

This metric is more important for call centers than your company, but it’s still good to know. Its importance is the insight it gives to call centers in terms of how many agents they need for a particular client at any given time, in order to lower queue times for customers.

Ready to learn more about the value of outsourcing your customer service to a call center in Canada, serving global clients? Get in touch with Advantage Communications today and learn more about how we can help.

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Published by Thomas Cannon May 24, 2019