How can I set metrics for customer satisfaction and customer profitability?

How can I set metrics for customer satisfaction and customer profitability?

As a call center manager, how can I set metrics that encourage my agents to build customer satisfaction that will lead to profitability?

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If you are a call center manager and you and each of your direct reports have not yet read Bill Price and David Jaffe's excellent book The Best Service is No Service (Wiley, 2008), then shame on you! You need to rush online to Amazon and get that book immediately. I'm recommending Amazon partly because that company will surely have the book in stock and ready for immediate shipment, because Bill Price is the former VP of Global Customer Service at Amazon.

To track your customers' satisfaction with agent calls, you need to set up measurements that are going to be based largely on samples, surveys, and mystery calls, because "satisfaction" is not a variable that will drop naturally out of metrics set up to track efficiency, cost, and other easily captured financial numbers. So, for instance, some metrics that Price and Jaffe recommend for tracking profitable customer satisfaction are:

Did my problem get fixed? Measure this by sampling resolution rates using a quality team or by tracking repeat contact rates. What's the "snowball ratio" and how many contacts require immediate re-contact?

How was I treated? Monitor behaviors with a sampling of calls, letters, or emails for quality, and with immediate post-contact feedback from the customer.

Did I get the right answer? In your quality monitoring review, verify this by checking adherence to specific policies.

Did this get fixed in the manner and time that I expected? You can confirm this with immediate, post-contact feedback from the customer, and by ensuring that all long-running processes are delivered in accordance with whatever standards have already been communicated to customers.

This was first published in August 2009

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