Contact center leaders are in a tough place.
Executives demand faster results, happier customers, and shrinking budgets. It’s a high-stakes juggling act: chasing efficiency without sacrificing connections.
But what if the problem isn’t the pressure itself?
What if it’s the way we are defining success?
The trap of viewing the service function as a cost center is not a new one. So many executives seem programmed to think this way and are overly focused on cost reduction and efficiency.
This can be a hard escape room to get out of.
In helping to establish multiple contact centers, there is one especially powerful method I’ve used to extract them from the confines of these conflicting corporate directives. And that is to measure the larger strategic value of meaningful customer interactions.
Unfortunately, the concept of “value” can be difficult to measure. The vast majority of common metrics we use to measure customer service/contact center performance are insufficient or misleading:
- Average handle time (AHT) tells us how quickly we handled an interaction, but not if the interaction was helpful or valuable.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) gives you a general idea of customer sentiment, but it often fails to illuminate actionable insight or correlate to loyalty.
- Cost per contact is generally the pinnacle of “efficiency” thinking: if not balanced with other data points. But it only validates the cost to support customers. Critically, it lacks perspective on the broader benefits and impacts of supporting customers well.
The bottom line is that if we focus too much on customer happiness or too much on efficiency, we end up missing the mark.
Contact center leaders are in a tough place... But what if the problem isn’t the pressure... What if it’s the way we are defining success?
We know that both are extremely important. On the efficiency side, there is so much research showing how the concept of ease of business/reduction of effort/simplicity for the customer results in increased loyalty. Not to mention the cost reduction to the business.
And as we think about customer “happiness,” this is where the business gets to show off its competitive differentiators and build sticky relationships.
It’s all about finding balance and focusing on the right value generators at the right time.
What Success Looks Like
Here is the big shift: “Make the quick parts quick and the slow parts meaningful.”
This is what success looks like in a customer service interaction. It’s not about doing everything fast. It’s about being strategic with the time you have to maximize value.
When recently building a brand-new quality program from the ground up, I had a bit of a revelation. There are essentially two core “success” types in a customer service interaction.
- The “quick” parts: gathering ticket history, validating identity, accessing company information, navigating tools, executing a back-end process, etc.
- The “slow” parts: establishing rapport, understanding the context behind an inquiry, being proactive to reduce future friction, and fostering long-term partnership.
Both of these attributes of a service interaction are essential and strategic. It requires a highly capable service worker with the right skills and the right mentality to unlock both.
When it comes to finding and hiring these exceptional individuals, I focus on finding the ones who are “pre-activated” to care deeply about the unique mission of the organization. Skills can be trained and knowledge fostered, but motivation is what leads to exceptional experiences.
...“Make the quick parts quick and the slow parts meaningful.” This is what success looks like in a customer service interaction.
But it’s not all on the agent (not even close). This type of interaction is the result of a service leader with both vision and experience design skill. Balance interactions are hand-crafted through supporting functions, exceptional coaching/training, and most of all a “servant challenger” culture.
The quality program and performance management function are especially critical. If these don’t back up the “quick parts quick, slow parts meaningful” principle, it will only generate frustration and confusion.
A Value-Driven Quality Management (QM) Approach
Back to the question of how we measure success. This begins with a quality scorecard that reinforces the right type of behavior tied to one of our two strategic value generators. Let’s look at some sample questions:
Quality Scorecard Part 1, “Quick Parts Quick”
- Was the primary issue resolved effectively?
- Did the agent effectively leverage verified knowledge to guide the interaction?
- Was the interaction properly documented in a clear and concise manner?
- Did the customer spend unnecessary time during the interaction waiting for next steps?
These and similar questions will make it very clear if you honored the customer’s time and made it easy to do business with you. When we look at things like the Simplicity Index, the value is obvious (beyond just cost savings).
Quality Scorecard Part 2, “Slow Parts Meaningful”
- Did the agent set a friendly, patient, and helpful tone at the beginning of the interaction?
- Did the agent go beyond practical resolution to address the thoughts and feelings the customer was experiencing?
- Did the agent offer proactive assistance beyond issue resolution?
- Did the agent effectively demonstrate a tone of partnership and gratitude at the close of the interaction?
As a service leader, it is important to make it easy for agents to understand this shift in thinking. They should not be rushing through an interaction.
Make a list together of the stages of a typical customer interaction that are the “quick parts.” Then do the same thing together with the “slow parts.”
Then connect the dots with them on how each part is managed differently, and the two different forms of value they can help to generate. Having frontline employees involved in the change process will greatly accelerate the transformation.
Conclusion: Measure the Impact
You’ve changed the way your team interacts. Now prove the value. Tie service improvements to business outcomes: or risk having your strategy labeled “nice, but not necessary.”
See Chart 1 as an example. It’s the role of the service leader to identify how improving a “customer service activity” on the left impacts “business outcomes” on the right.
For inspiration: previously when working with a top five producer in the gaming industry, we discovered that by moving the needle on customer sentiment it had a significant impact on future player spend. This earned us freedom to strategically slow down interactions, especially with VIPs, to ensure the best possible experience.
How can you bring balance to your interactions to maximize value? Service leaders who can make quick parts quick and slow parts meaningful will be at a huge advantage.