Call Center Satisfaction in Dollars And Cents
Numbers abound in customer service centers. Without breaking too much of a sweat, marketers are able to track the number of calls received during an hour or a shift; whether representatives are able to resolve queries without needing to consult with a manager; and if calls are handled within a certain period of time. But are these metrics necessarily the most beneficial ones?
But while these metrics might be easy to measure, they are not necessarily the ones most beneficial to a contact center. So says Jodie Monger, president of Customer Relationship Metrics, a research consultancy based in Sterling, VA.
In fact, some measurements, such as the push to keep interactions under a certain time limit, might result in callers receiving shoddy service. It happens because the service center representative is paying more attention to the clock than to resolving the issue at hand.
According to Monger, measuring the average length of calls—“Average Handle Time,” or AHT—is a metric that doesn’t have any import to any part of an organization outside the call center. In its place, she offers an equation that allows marketers to quantify the return on investment of their contact centers.
Monger’s equation assumes that call centers survey customers regarding their satisfaction with their calls. On a ten-point scale, callers who rate their experiences with a nine or 10 are categorized as “delighted.” Conversely, any caller who gives a rating of three or below is considered “dissatisfied.”
In a hypothetical case, Monger assumes that a company has surveyed 100,000 callers, and has found that 60% are “delighted” and 5% are “dissatisfied.”
Monger then uses transactional data to determine the average value of all customers. She assigns the value of $50 per customer. She multiplies the total number of customers surveyed (100,000) by the percentage of satisfied customers (60%, or .6) and multiplies that by the average value of each customer. She then multiplies the number of dissatisfied customers (5%, or .05) by the number of customers surveyed, which has also been multiplied by the average value of each customer.
Next, she subtracts the revenue generated by dissatisfied customers from that of satisfied customers (in this case, $3 million minus $250,000). She divides the result ($2.75 million) by the amount, in dollars, it costs to operate the call center for the period in question – however long it takes to service 100,000 customers.
In this example, Monger assumes that a call center’s total costs are $2,083,333. When $2.75 million is divided by $2,083,333, the result is 1.32. When that figure is multiplied by 100, it results in a contact center ROI figure of 132%. The beauty of this is that a spike in dissatisfied customers will have a clear, and rather drastic, impact on the metric. (Call center managers whose ROI figure is below 100% should probably either retrain current or recruit new staff, or update their own resumes.)
That ROI figure offers marketers a number of tools. First, it gives a clear sense of the value of the call center, which can in turn be used to justify additional investment, or (in tight times) maintenance. Furthermore, it establishes a dollars-and-cents performance metric, as opposed to one based on the more arbitrary performance metrics assigned to each seat in a center.
Finally, it gives call center reps justification for treating customers like customers, and not like cost centers. And that will result both in measurable and immeasurable benefits to the organization.
