Highlights:
- Your contact center is the front line for customers, so it is essential that you ensure an excellent customer experience at every interaction
- A positive customer experience affects the rest of your business, it’s important you know how your contact center is performing down to the numbers
- Measuring customer experience metrics can help your contact center find areas of opportunity and growth
Measuring customer experience metrics in a contact center is critical because these metrics give you insight into how you can improve your contact center operations and make customers happier. Which metrics matter most for customer experience?
What is the customer experience?
Customer experience refers to the impression your brand gives customers throughout the entire customer journey. What do they think of how you handled their issue? Do you have the right product or service to meet their needs? If they turn to you for support, will they get the help they need, or will they struggle to find answers?
The role of the contact center in the customer experience
Your contact center plays a significant role in the customer experience. It’s the first place customers tend to turn when they have a problem or a question that they can’t solve on their own.
When agents can answer questions (and more importantly, solve problems) quickly and correctly, customers have a better experience. Research shows that 41 percent of customers stopped using a brand or service after they were passed from rep to rep during an interaction, so what happens in a contact center matters quite a bit.
Why measure customer experience metrics?
The concept of customer experience doesn’t sound like it lends itself to quantification. Yet, there are ways to measure customer experience, and you absolutely should make every effort to understand what the customer experience is like at your contact center.
Here’s why: if your customers have a positive experience with your contact center, they’ll tell others. Data shows that customers who enjoy their interactions with a company are five times more likely to recommend a brand to others. In addition, customers who had a good experience are 54 percent more likely to make a repeat purchase.
Which customer experience metrics matter in your contact center?
We’ll look at customer experience metrics through three contact center lenses:
- Channel metrics
- Omnichannel metrics
- Enterprise-wide metrics
Channel metrics
The three important contact center experience channel metrics are:
- First contact resolution
- Contact channel customer satisfaction
- Customer emotion experience
1. First contact resolution
First contact resolution (FCR for short) measures how many customers resolve their problems the first time they reach out to you.
FCR matters because the more you’re able to solve someone’s problems on the first try, the more likely they are to remain your customer. No one wants to have to reach out to a company repeatedly about the same issue.
2. Contact channel customer satisfaction
Contact channel customer satisfaction is the percentage of customers who are satisfied with a specific contact center channel.
Today’s contact center software supports more than one channel. Yet, the customer experience might not be the same for all of them. This metric gives you a sense of individual channel performance, so you can course-correct if need be.
3. Customer emotion experience
Customer emotion experience metrics assess how many customers thought the experience was perfect (or, if not perfect, then very good).
This metric gives you the deepest sense of your contact center performance. It shows what people think of the job you’re doing, which gives you the opportunity to fix what’s going wrong or stay on course.
Omnichannel metrics
Today’s customers typically use more than one channel to connect with a company, so it’s important to look at omnichannel contact center metrics such as seamless experience and omnichannel experience.
4. Seamless experience
Seamless experience contact center metrics show you the percentage of customers who had a completely seamless experience in using multiple channels to resolve the same problem.
The omnichannel experience is supposed to be seamless, but that’s not always the case. This metric shows you whether the omnichannel experience is actually working or not.
5. Omnichannel experience
The omnichannel experience is related to seamless experience metrics, yet it takes it one step further: it looks at the seamlessness of the experience as well as how satisfied customers were with using multiple channels to resolve the same problem.
Enterprise-wide metrics
Enterprise-wide contact center experience metrics look at the customer experience across the entire organization. There are two metrics in this category: net promoter score and net retention index.
6. Net promoter score
The net promoter score (NPS for short) has become the gold standard of customer experience metrics. Developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, it evaluates how likely it would be for a customer to recommend a particular organization.
Customers choose from a scale of one to ten; the higher the score, the more likely they are to promote your company. Keeping track of NPS metrics tells you how customers feel about your company. If scores are too low, that means they’re having a poor customer experience, and you need to understand why and work quickly to improve it.
7. Net retention index
The net retention index measures the percentage of customers who want to continue doing business with a given organization, minus the percentage of customers who are at risk of leaving the company.
Retaining customers is important because it costs less to keep an existing customer than it does to acquire a new one. When your customers have a poor experience, they won’t stay with your company. A PwC survey found that 32% of customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. Taking the time to understand your retention statistics is the first step to improving your customer experience.
Boost your customer experience metrics with RingCentral’s contact center software
RingCentral’s contact center software offers intuitive dashboards and reports to help you keep track of customer experience metrics. With pre-built reports such as average handle time, first call resolution, and queue time, and real-time dashboards, you can gain insight into agent performance and customer experience as it happens. To learn more, get a demo.
Originally published Aug 09, 2021, updated Aug 06, 2024
