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Customer experience is a key competitive brand differentiator. To build long-lasting customer relationships, you must deliver effortless, omnichannel experiences.
The contact center is often a customer’s first contact with your company. Your success often depends on whether that first experience establishes a long-term, loyal relationship—or sends the customer running to your competitors. In the recent Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Study from Dimension Data, more than 84% of respondents said that improved customer experience increased revenue; 79% reported cost savings as a result.
In a rapidly evolving industry, it’s critical to keep up with the latest contact center technologies and base your customer experience strategy on solid, quantifiable data.
Contact center benchmarking does just that.
Why Contact Center Metrics Matters
The term “benchmarking” historically refers to standardized tasks that test the capabilities of devices against each other. In quality terms, benchmarking means comparing products, services, and processes with other organizations’ products, services, and processes to identify new ideas and areas for improvement. It’s an analytical method of studying your contact center’s capabilities and business processes and comparing them to your competitors—through certain KPIs.
The trick is leveraging that information to make improvements.
Review your practices consistently to improve customer service readiness. Contact center benchmarking has a range of benefits.
- Access to quantitative data on your operations. You can see if—and how—you keep pace with industry trends and how you compare with others in the industry in readiness and maturity.
- An understanding of the customer journey—the full customer experience, including all journey steps and touchpoints along the way to achieve goals.
- Access to data you can use to invest in improvements and inform your managers about where to focus their efforts.
- Guidance on agent training.
- Information for service of financial analysis and business modeling to help you understand—and improve—ROI.
Which KPIs to Benchmark
Various elements affect the overall quality of your customer experience. KPIs are used to understand how you’re doing and how you compare to others in your field. The areas of focus for contact center benchmarking can vary widely and could include quality, agent performance, productivity or cost.
You can’t measure everything; focus on what’s most relevant to your contact center operations and what will achieve your organization’s goals.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and leverage your metrics gives you a better chance to improve customer experience. AI lets contact centers move beyond operational metrics (e.g., SLAs, average speed of answer, average handle times, abandon rates). Predictive AI enable managers to optimize business outcomes, such as Net Promoter Score, first contact resolution or sales closure rates, to transform your contact center into a revenue/brand ambassador center.
Customer experience is a key brand differentiator. The initial moment a customer interacts with your contact center is a chance to build a long-term relationship. By studying your performance and using data-driven methods, such as contact center benchmarking, you’ll have the information you need to drive continuous improvements, deliver excellent customer experience and ensure success.
