A Happy New Year to everyone!!!! I trust that everyone have a lovely break.

Just to prove the importance of how a great experience can lead to positive word of mouth that potentially drives business success……….I can totally recommend a trip to Vietnam. Having holidayed there over Christmas, I would certainly encourage you to visit.

However, Advocacy and Recommendation is not this week's topic. The role of measuring customer feedback for assessing the performance of a contact centre operation is. The reason why? Because I am very upset!!!!

In a recent study conducted by DMG Consulting, organisations were asked to indicate which KPI's they used to manage their contact centre operations. Out of the 20 attributes mentioned, Customer Satisfaction measures didn't even make it into the top 10. In fact it came 12th with only 49% of organisations claiming they used customer satisfaction measurement within their KPI reporting.

Even our own benchmarking data confirms the same result for the Australian market. The Australian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report published in 2011 indicates that 79% of organisations surveyed were assessing customer experience. Pleasantly, this was up from 65% in 2008. However, digging a little deeper shows the frequency that organisations are capturing customer feedback is low with two-thirds of organisations assessing customer experience less often than monthly.

Being a customer research advocate I would want to see Customer Experience as the number one measure used by all organisations to measure the performance of its service operations.

Organisations cannot effectively manage their customer service operations if performance assessments are based purely on operational KPI's such as average talk time, abandonment rates and speed of answer. By not understanding how operational based attributes impact a customer's level of satisfaction and engagement, organisations cannot successfully plan and identify service and process areas that require improvement. Analysing the relationship between operational measures and customer satisfaction and engagement not only delivers a more holistic view of performance, it also helps identify and prioritise service and process initiatives that will lead to better customer experience outcomes.

In a number of studies conducted by Fifth Quadrant, we have investigated the relationship between customer satisfaction and engagement with contact centre KPI's such as Number of Transfers, Query Resolution, On Hold Time and Speed of Answer. We have consistently proven that Query Resolution is the most significant driver of customer satisfaction and engagement. But what about the other measures? A quick poll. Between Number of Transfers, On Hold Time and Speed of Answer, which do think has the biggest impact on customer engagement? In a recent case study, we found that satisfaction with time spent on hold had the greatest impact on overall customer satisfaction and engagement. This was followed by satisfaction with speed of answer. The relationship with number of transfers was interesting. We found that there was not a significant difference in the level of satisfaction and engagement between customers who had not been transferred and customers who had been transferred once. However, a significant drop in satisfaction and engagement occurred amongst customers who had been transferred multiple times.

This type of analysis is really straight forward so long as one is able to directly link operational performance measures to individual customers who have completed a customer satisfaction and engagement survey.

Just to conclude my little rant. I am not sure what is worse, the fact that customer satisfaction was ranked 12th or that Query Resolution rates and Customer Complaint Monitoring didn't even make to the top 20.