“What are the trends in customer service?” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question, then I’d be a rich[er] man. Joking aside, this question is constantly on the mind of contact center executives, and for good reason. Keeping up with peers is important, especially when customer service is increasingly a feature of your brand.
We featured a webinar this summer on customer service trends, which includes things as adapting QA programs to better align with customers and incorporating VOC in a more actionable way. These types of trends are what we hear through conversation over the years, but one resource I find interesting to use for surfacing trends is our benchmarking database (for CCC members), which is now five years old. For its fifth birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to see what has changed since 2005.
Trend #1: Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is faster than ever. In 2005, ASA for consumers was 57 seconds, while now it is 30 seconds. For business customers, it has gone from 51 to 14 seconds. Interestingly enough, that’s right around what our conjoint analysis on customer preferences indicated as the preference for wait times: 30 for B2C and 15 for B2B.
Trend #2: Average Handle Time has increased by 100 seconds, while hours of operation per day have decreased by nearly four hours. There are many things that could be causing this counter-intuitive finding. My assumption, though, is that call volumes are down, but the calls that we do still receive are increasingly complex and so take more time to resolve. Much of this is probably because customers are increasingly handling simple issues in self-service, which would reduce overall call volumes while changing the mix of calls to more complex.
Trend #3: Rep to Supervisor Span of Control is shrinking. With decreases from 17 to 14 for B2C organizations and 20 to 11 for B2B organizations, we have a clear signal that the supervisor role is increasingly important. Having enough supervisors to effectively coach frontline staff should be a key priority, so it looks like most centers are coming to that realization.
While these data nuggets may not signal massive shifts in strategy, my general take away from them all is that customers are becoming more difficult to serve – they want to reach us faster, their issues are more complex, and we need more middle management staff to handle it all. How is your organization working to address these new challenges? I would imagine the playbook has changed a bit since 2005.
I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that the sixth version of our annual benchmarking survey will open in January. If you are interested, then please let us know.
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on November 23, 2010
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Regarding handle-time increases, I agree with the point that more self-service is driving more complex calls to the agents. I would also point out that in the increasingly competitive environment we are all working in companies have had an increased focus on the customer experience and a shift away from the transactional model of handling our customers. This would increase handling times – and ideally higher revenues and customer satisfaction.
While the author indicates there were many things which could be driving the upward trend, I think this important (and needed) change toward more customer-centric strategies is an important one to note.
on September 7, 2011
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[...] TweetWhen we released our Annual Operational Benchmarking Results last year, I wrote about trends we’ve seen over the past five years across our entire data set. This year, rather than look at longitudinal differences, I’d like [...]