The work of the leaders of call centers and sales departments is not easy. It is necessary to help employees cope with the tasks set, prepare and provide information to management at the end of the reporting period, and sometimes solve issues that no one in the company has solved before.
Due to the high workload, it is difficult to find the time to analyze and understand which indicators have a positive impact on the level of customer service. We have prepared a list of metrics for managers that are definitely worth paying attention to.
CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Index
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is an index of customer satisfaction. With it, you can conduct a deep analysis of the quality of the company’s work, in particular, find gaps in customer service, product characteristics, and even marketing. A distinctive feature of the metric is that feedback is taken directly from customers.
For example, a person may encounter a CSAT after calling the bank and being asked to stay on the line and report how satisfied they are with the service. Or after ordering a product in an online store, the customer will receive an SMS with a link to a survey regarding the quality of service.
When measuring the index, the global situation in the company becomes clear. And when implementing CSAT at different stages of interaction with customers, the data can be detailed, and then more and more specific growth points of employees can be identified. You can read more about the metric in the article “ How Quality Control Helps Improve Customer Satisfaction ”.NPS: customer loyalty index
The NPS metric (Net Promoter Score) shows how willing customers are to recommend a company, its products or services to their friends. It is especially important to track the loyalty index over time in order to correctly evaluate the effectiveness of changes in business processes.
To measure NPS, a customer survey is conducted by phone, in an email newsletter, or on a website. A person is asked to answer the question: “What is the probability that you will recommend the brand to your friends?”, and are asked to rate it from 1 to 10. Then the percentage of critics, neutrals and promoters is calculated. You can read more about the measurement and analysis of the metric in the article “ What is NPS, or customer loyalty index ?”.
CSI: consumer loyalty index
CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) is an important indicator for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Despite the semantic similarity with the two previous metrics, it focuses the attention of managers on something else. Namely, which business parameters are critically important for customers.
For example, a person may be dissatisfied with the quality of service. But he will still continue to interact with the company, since for him the key parameters are the price and product characteristics.
Measuring CSI is more difficult than CSAT and NPS. To get to know the metric in more detail, we recommend reading the article “ All about the CSI index: value, formula and calculation example ”.
LTV: customer lifetime value
LTV (Lifetime Value) is an indicator that indicates the total amount of profit that the company receives for the entire time of cooperation with the client. It helps to predict the path of the client and correctly allocate the budget. In particular, invest more in those who are likely to stay with the company for a long time, and spend less on the disloyal.
There are many formulas for calculating LTV depending on the goals. For example, to predict a business for a short period, you can calculate the metric as follows:
LTV = Lifetime x RPR x AOV
Where Lifetime is the time of active cooperation between the client and the company, RPR is how often the client makes repeated purchases, AOV is the amount of the average bill.
SL: service level
Sl (Service Level) shows the percentage of requests that operators or managers managed to process in a certain period of time, for example, 20 seconds. In fact, how quickly employees serve customers.
The indicator is calculated using a simple formula: SL = the number of calls received in the allotted time period / the total number of calls received in the queue. The ideal value for most business areas is 80%. With a decrease in SL, customer satisfaction may fall, and reaching 100% may result in large payroll costs for the company.
Volume of communications per operator
The indicator indicates how many contacts with customers employees make per unit of time. For example, how many calls, chats, and emails an agent handles per day, month, or quarter. When analyzing the metric, it becomes clear when the call center team needs to expand its staff, and when it needs to be optimized.
Let’s take an example. The company opens an online store selling bicycles. Traditionally, a bicycle is a means of active recreation during the period from spring to autumn. Accordingly, the peak of sales falls at the end of spring – the beginning of summer. It is at this time that employees make the maximum amount of communication with customers. Whether it’s incoming calls about a purchase, or requests for a part of the service, the essence remains the same – if the company is not aware of periods of increased load, at some point it will be difficult for operators to work with a large number of customers. This may lead to a decrease in the quality of service.
The reverse is also true. In winter, when the number of calls is reduced several times, there is no need to bear the cost of maintaining a large staff.
CPC: Cost of Communication
CPC (Cost Per Conversation) is the total number of employee interactions with customers divided by the payroll and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that provides the communications themselves.
Let’s go back to the online store example. During the high season, the company sells 700 bikes per month, which requires handling approximately 2,100 incoming calls. With an average salary of a sales manager, taking into account the social package of 70,000 rubles and the cost of IP telephony of 12,000 rubles / month, the CPC calculation will be like this:
(70,000 + 12,000) / 2100 = 39 rubles.
There are a lot of options for improving the indicator. One of them is adding an automatic checkout system to the site. At the same time, the number of communications with customers may not change, but the number of sales will grow, thereby reducing CPC. This will allow the company not only to save money, but also to maintain the quality of service at a high level.
FRT: First Response Time
FRT (First Response Time) indicates how long customers must wait before receiving an answer to their question. The metric is considered simple: the time of the client’s call and the response time of the operator are recorded. The difference is FRT.
The indicator directly affects how satisfied customers will be with the quality of service. No one wants to wait a long time for an operator to pick up the phone or answer a chat message. The company may be doing great in terms of solving issues and expertise, but if the client was on the line for 10 minutes before that, the overall rating of the service will be lower than expected.
There are many ways to improve FRT. One of them is the distribution of the load on operators depending on the category of communication. For example, calls from “hot” customers are answered by sales staff, and calls for questions related to the use of the product after purchase are answered by support staff.
IQS: internal quality indicators
Internal quality indicators are KPIs that can be used to measure the performance of call center or sales staff. The metrics are derived by constantly and systematically evaluating the quality of customer communications.
Usually, this work is carried out by specialists of the quality control department. They develop and improve service standards, create checklists for evaluating calls, chats, emails and other types of communications. Then they carry out the required number of checks, form analytics and provide reporting to their manager.