Top managers at most companies view their call centers as a cost of doing business. They’re expensive to operate because they require ACDs, IT gear, phones, computers, and other devices, and because the staff (agents, supervisors, second-tier escalation experts, and others) are highly trained and therefore costly. However, by implementing a management framework and focusing on delighting your customers, you can begin to transform your cost center into a profit center.
Customers are the lifeblood of every company, and businesses today recognize the importance of satisfying them. In recent years, companies have increasingly focused on ways to improve the “customer experience.” And with good reason, because what customers experience as they interact with each step of your sales funnel determines how they perceive your company. When those experiences and perceptions are positive, customers develop favorable feelings about your brand, product, or company. Those positive feelings are what every business strives for, and in this article, we’ll discuss how your call center can play a huge role in building positive customer experiences.
Why is the Customer Experience So Important?
Stop and think: If you don’t care about your customers and how they experience your company, they’ll probably become, at best, one-time customers who exchange their dollars for one of your products or services, then disappear forever. They won’t become loyal to your brand, and a study by Adobe found that loyal customers spend 67 percent more than ordinary new customers through repeat purchases, larger cart sizes, and frequent upsells. But that’s not all.
Customers who are engaged with your company, product, service, or brand will drive significant revenue increases. Those customers won’t bother to consider what your competition has to offer because they’re already “wedded” to you. Such customers can lower your customer acquisition costs. They can even help you determine whether the cost of acquiring new customers brings you a greater ROI than simply servicing your loyal, engaged customers.
Furthermore …
- Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your brand, product, or firm to their coworkers, family, friends, and social media connections.
- You’ll find greater success with new products and services because the engaged customers already believe in your company. They’re much closer to buying a new offering than the “man in the street” who has no experience with your company.
- You will enjoy stronger relations between your sales/marketing staff and your customer base. These personal relationships, as between a salesperson or account manager and a customer, further cement the customer’s intent to buy only from you. This kind of relationship can virtually eliminate any competition from entering the scene.
- Engaged customers place real value on their overall experience with your company. They’re less concerned with the price of your product/service because they value their overall connection to your company more than the cost of a particular product.
In short, highly engaged customers lead a company to growth, success, and profitability. So, let’s see how you can manage your call center to achieve those outcomes.
How to Engage More Customers via Your Call Center
The key to running a call center that delights your customers is establishing the rules and best practices by which the center runs. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a multi-volume framework that describes an integrated, process-based, best practice framework for managing IT services, including call centers (aka service desks). ITIL was developed in the United Kingdom during the 1980s and has become the go-to resource for IT departments all around the world.
While an in-depth discussion of ITIL is beyond the scope of this article, ITIL keeps its focus on two fundamental goals:
- Continually improving customer satisfaction and helping customers meet their business objectives
- Delivering support to customers at the lowest possible cost consistent with meeting the first goal
Under the ITIL framework, you’re asked to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that inform you of the overall performance of your call center. Several of those metrics relate directly to customer satisfaction, as summarized in this table.
| Metric | How this Relates to Customer Satisfaction |
| Average Speed to Answer (ASA) | Short hold and wait times correlate to some extent with the degree of customer satisfaction. |
| Abandoned Call Rate (ACR) | Users ending a call before speaking with an agent usually do so because hold time is too long. This metric correlates inversely with Customer Satisfaction. |
| Agent Satisfaction | This metric impacts both call center efficiency and the customer experience. Agents satisfied with their jobs are innately more effective and likely to satisfy callers. |
| First Call Resolution Rate | High values for this metric correlate with high customer satisfaction. Incidents resolved on the first call require less time, and the caller gets a resolution to the incident rather than having to wait for a callback. This leaves a positive impression on callers about the efficiency and competency of the call center. Further, the cost of resolving the call is lower because it was not escalated to a higher tier of support where the labor is more costly. |
| Average Handle Time (AHT) | This measures the average time a call center agent spends in resolving a customer incident. Speedy resolution relates to high customer satisfaction. |
| SLA Compliance Rate | This metric alerts you to your failure to comply with your published SLA, which may occur due to new agents with short experience, inadequate training, or other issues. Failing to uphold your SLAs can lead to customer dissatisfaction. |
| Customer Effort Score | A measure of customer loyalty. It measures how much effort a customer has to expend to obtain an answer or solution to a problem. |
| Net Promoter Score | This measures how customers feel about a company, brand, product, or service by measuring customers’ willingness to recommend the organization, brand, product, or service to others. As such, it gives a score to the customer’s experience and loyalty. More than two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use NPS as one of their measurement tools. |
Conclusion
Your call center may well be the single biggest point of contact between customers and your company or brand. Adopting the best practices outlined in the ITIL documentation and developing metrics that measure different aspects of customer satisfaction puts you on the road to delighting customers and bringing the resulting benefits to your company.
