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My last job was a dream job for me. I managed a data science team at a small CCaaS company, Sharpen. We had a forward-thinking CEO who was very focused on customer success, and he gave me a simple charge: make our customers happier.
I am a data guy, and at Sharpen we had terrific access to customer data and we had developed a robust business intelligence tool. My recipe for customer happiness was simple: I asked our 100ish customers if they would like us to use their data to answer some pressing business questions. My team would be their free business consultants.
Many of them took us up on it. We received great questions, like: “Now that our agents are working from home, what are they actually doing?” “Is anyone gaming their performance statistics?” A favorite: “How hard are we to do business with?” Another: “How can I tell what each agent is proficient at?” And then a killer: “What is important to our customers?”
Let’s discuss this last business question. Like any mature industry, we have many traditions. One common thought, expressed over and over, is that reducing handle times brings with it a lousy customer experience. The feeling is that we do not want agents to worry about AHTs if our company is customer-focused. Is this true?
So we looked at contact center data. Figure 1 shows a scatter plot of a month’s worth of agent performance history. On the X-axis, we are plotting the average AHT of each phone agent. On the Y-axis, we plot their average monthly CSAT score as tallied via customer surveys. If handle times were important to these customers, if longer handle times brought meaningful benefit to customers, you would expect that the CSAT data would point up sharply as handle times increased. But it doesn’t.
Figure 1. Scatter plot of AHT Vs. the CSAT of each phone agent
Instead, we see in the data a big blob, signifying nothing. Agents who work quicker have no worse score than those that speak slowly. It means, basically, that customers do not care about how long the calls take.
Let’s chat about hold times. Nobody likes being put on hold by the agent, right? I don’t. Let’s test this and look at the data. Figure 2 plots the average hold time per call for each agent, plotted, again, against their CSAT score. We all hate being put on hold and so this curve will show that as hold time increases CSAT drops, right?
Figure 2. Scatter plot of Hold Time Vs. the CSAT of each phone agent
Well, no. Once again, the blob of data flies in the face of our conventional wisdom. Hold time does not influence customer satisfaction. While it might be irritating, it certainly isn’t so much so that it affects the overall customer experience.
So, what else? We drew all sorts of scatter plots, service levels and ASA (no effect, unless there are super crazy wait times), transfers (it showed a mild effect on CSAT), and agent occupancy (no effect).
But then we ran into a doozy, maybe the Holy Grail of contact center agent performance metrics. Figure 3 plots CSAT against a metric we called Active Contact Resolution, or ACR. In this metric, we calculate something simple: for each agent, how many times does the customer have to call back in some time frame (for this case, 24 hours) after speaking to our agent? So, on the Y-axis, we measure the success rate of each agent, or the percentage of time that an agent answers all of the customer’s questions and plot it against the CSAT score.
Figure 3. Scatter plot of ACR Vs. the CSAT of each phone agent
Lo and behold! We have a winner! It seems that ACR tracks very closely to what satisfies customers. Improve ACR and you can improve CSAT.
From my perusal of the data, customers don’t care about their hold times, or their wait times, or their handle times, or how busy the agent is. But they never ever want to have to call us back again.
That’s what your customers care about.
Ric is a founder of Real Numbers, a contact center modeling company. He can be reached at ri*@*********rs.com or (410) 562-1217. Please know that we are *very* interested in learning about your business problems and challenges (and what you think of these articles). Want to improve that capacity plan? You can find Ric’s calendar and can schedule time with him at realnumbers.com. Follow Ric on LinkedIn! (www.linkedin.com/in/ric-kosiba/)