A customer calls your company. They’re deflected or handled or even converted. But are they satisfied?

According to a February 2012 International Customer Management Institute article, “Call Center Metrics vs. Customer Experience Metrics: The Critical Difference,” customer relationship expert and CEO Mary Murcott suggests that customer service and customer experience are worlds apart. And so are the metrics that go along with them.

Customer Service Metrics are Out of Pace 

According to a survey conducted by Gartner back in 2008, 80% of executives believe customer engagement practices impact customer loyalty. The difficulty is that traditional customer service metrics paint an inaccurate picture. Or at least not one that will help companies retain customers.

Traditional customer service metrics measure the wrong things. For instance, instead of measuring the length of time a customer rep is on the phone with a customer (often known as average handle time or AHT) it is more important to determine the quality of the call.

As Flavio Martins explains in his 2012 post, “The 4 Quality Questions You Need to Measure Customer Experience”:

Let’s face it. Long calls, don’t necessarily mean bad service, I’ve seen superstar customer support people spend hours on the phone with a customer resolving a customer issue. This is a good thing; we need to encourage engagement in our teams and taking the time needed to solve the problem.

Remember, customers are more concerned about having their issue addressed, than the length of time they spend on the phone, though they don’t want to spend any more time on the phone than is necessary.

Measure Quality to Determine Customer Experience

In order to make the customer experience the best it can be, stop utilizing old outdated metrics that merely focus on “usage of equipment and not on helping customers.” Martins suggests asking customers to rate these four questions on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the best):

• How likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or family member?
• How likely are you to request the customer rep you spoke with again?
• How likely are you to recommend this person to a friend or co-workers?
• How likely are you to try to hire this person, if you owned your own business?

Instead of discouraging employees from truly helping customers, review the numbers only to determine anomalies or those outliers that are extreme. Perhaps the issue wasn’t resolved the first time around (no first call resolution) and now it has escalated.

It’s important to encourage employees to think and behave like adults who know how to do their jobs: effectively and efficiently provide a postive customer experience.

That’s where we come in. We offer hosted call center solutions to connect people with the information they want while increasing customer loyalty and reducing operational costs. Call us today to learn more.