BPA Featured Article

Customer experience may just sound like the latest catchphrase. But it’s a real, and the CX your company delivers can have a big impact on your business.

"Customer experience has come to the forefront in distinguishing industry leaders from followers,” says Miki Migdal, president of NICE Enterprise Product Group. “As more organizations understand the prominence of customer experience as a key differentiator and prioritize it, innovative analytics solutions that help organize, analyze and operationalize customer journeys to drive the outcomes their customers expect will be critical to success."

Recent research from Microsoft (News - Alert) shows 97 percent of consumers consider customer service a key aspect of their loyalty to a business. And a call center can help drive customer service and CX successes by enhancing agent performance, increasing operational efficiency, and elevating CX in the process.

To do that, businesses and their call centers and contact centers have to decide what aspects they consider most important in creating good or great customer experiences. For example, is average time to answer key? What about first call resolution? Customer satisfaction rating? Or Net Promoter Score?

Whatever the key performance indicators an organization focuses in on, that organization should start by benchmarking where it is now and where it wants to be with that metric or set of KPIs. Knowing where competitors are with those measures can also be helpful in setting expectations.

Another KPIs businesses will want to consider tracking and working to improve is agent satisfaction. After all, people are a really important part of delivering quality customer experiences. And happy agents tend to deliver better customer experiences, while frustrated or unhappy ones are less likely to drive customer satisfaction.