Measuring the Quality of Customer Service

When measuring the quality of customer service, your Philippines call centre must change its focus from the traditional outlook regarding the quantity of calls taken by agents to the quality of the service the agent provides to the customer. Customers expect efficient yet personal service and those expectations can remain unfulfilled if your Philippines call centre limits its focus to Average Handle Time (AHT) and Number of Calls Handled per Hour.  While these metrics are useful for determining workflow and training issues, they overlook customer satisfaction and service quality.

The Philippine call centre industry has adopted metrics that determine customer satisfaction and service quality.  These metrics include Customer Service Level (CSL), First-Call Resolution (FCR), Contact Quality and Employee Satisfaction (ES).

Customer Service Level (CSL)

The CSL metric measures the number of seconds required for a customer service agent to answer a call.  It is represented by a percentage of calls followed by the number of seconds the customer waited for an answer to the call.  For example, if customer accessibility is rated at “80/20” that means that 80% of customer calls were answered by an agent in 20 seconds.

CSL is more precise than an often-used metric called Average Speed of Answer or ASA.  ASA is a straight average that gives an imprecise picture of customer wait times.  For example, an ASA of 30 seconds does not necessarily indicate that a customer, or even most customers, only waited 30 seconds.  As an average, a 30 second ASA really means an imprecise number of customers waited less time or more time with no idea of how many on each end of that.  A manager may overlook investigating those cases where a customer waited longer than 30 seconds for an answer because the average looks to be acceptable. The CSL gives better information as the waiting time for a majority of calls.  This narrows the field in determining good performance and shortcomings in wait times.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

Customer satisfaction ratings decrease as much as 45% if a customer must make a second call to customer support to solve an issue.  Unfortunately, there is no reliable method of determining a rating for this metric and determining it may be limited to subjective means. Customer service surveys may be a good start in addressing this issue but the industry lacks further ideas.  Finding innovative people for Philippines call centres who may develop methods for this metric can be a better longer term solution.

Contact Quality for Customer Support

Like First Call Resolution, Contact Quality is very dependent on customer satisfaction.  Customer perspective must enter into the picture as well as internal monitoring of calls.  Internal call monitoring used alongside a customer service survey offers full information regarding the quality of customer service provided by a Philippines call centre agent. This will not be hard data but subjective standards where the internal information can be compared to the external information provided by the customer.  Matching customer praise or complaints with how the call transpired is helpful for determining training issues or awarding agents who provide exemplary service.

Customer Service Call Centre Agent Satisfaction

There is a direct link between employee satisfaction and good customer service provided to customers.  Unhappy employees will pass unhappiness to customers which, in turn increases customer complaints.  High employee turnover increases costs to the Philippines call centre through increased resources needed for recruiting and training new employees and future assessment of those employees. Measuring this metric may involve a third party doing a surveying  with the specialist checking with employees once or twice a year.  Questions asked may include what the employees like about the job, what can be improved and their impressions of attributes inherent to good workers.