Customer Service Effectiveness or Efficiency... which is more important?

Guest post by Scott Norteman - Product Management Director

In my years here at Jacada, I've been to dozens of our customers' contact centers and studied their metrics and how they are calculated. These companies all have the same goals of serving the customer and increasing customer satisfaction... but of course they must also reduce costs.

Traditional contact center metrics, such as AHT, ASA, Hold-time, Queue-time, etc., were developed with those goals in mind and focus on the length of time it takes to serve a customer's needs and the associated cost. It makes sense to use these metrics when the primary focus is efficiency. However, that doesn't provide any sense of whether the customer's issue is actually being resolved… and that is what concerns the customers.

To better understand whether the customer is being served properly, you have to measure effectiveness. The one most popular effectiveness metric is First Call Resolution (FCR). Many contact center managers have heard of this and in some cases, already attempt to measure it. Note the word "attempt". The converse of FCR is a metric coined "CSR solve-rate", which measures how effective an individual CSR is at serving the customers they have had contact with. These metrics focus on the same challenge from different perspectives. Ultimately, accurate measures of both are necessary to really understand the effectiveness of contact center operations.

Once you have a good understanding of FCR by contact type and reason, plus a clear view of which CSRs are most effective and where they face challenges, you can easily implement action to improve performance and re-engineer processes. FCR is the root metric that drives everything else.

So, back to my question... is effectiveness or efficiency more important? The easiest way to answer that question is to consider that if you begin to focus on CSR Solve-rate for understanding the effectiveness of CSR performance and FCR for understanding the effectiveness of contact types or processes, you will have a firm foundation for not only improving customer satisfaction, but significantly driving down cost by eliminating callbacks and repeat calls.

Given the root nature of FCR and Solve-rate as effectiveness measures, I believe effectiveness should become the driving force behind customer service improvement efforts. Do you agree?