Which customer experience analytics should a contact center measure?

Customers expect the best, and a well-functioning contact center is crucial to meeting and exceeding these expectations. To stay ahead, organizations must regularly evaluate their contact center performance by collecting and analyzing customer data through customer experience analytics.

Analytics provide a clear picture of the overall customer journey and help identify areas for improvement in agent performance and productivity. By focusing on key metrics, businesses can make informed decisions that enhance both the customer experience (CX) and internal operations.

Discover the most important CX analytics that every contact center should measure to deliver top-notch service and continuously improve.

Which customer experience analytics are most important to review?

It’s easy to focus on just one or two metrics. However, companies need to review a variety of customer experience metrics together to truly understand what the data is telling them.

For example, looking only at average wait time shows how quickly a contact center answers calls, but pairing this with the first contact resolution rate provides a fuller picture of how effectively issues are resolved once contact is made.

When performing a customer experience analysis, consider the following:

Measure service level to determine how accessible your company is to its customers.

Being readily available to customers fosters trust and ensures they receive the reliable assistance they need. That’s why service level, or the percentage of customer contacts answered within a specific time frame is essential for understanding how efficiently a contact center team responds to customer inquiries.

Since service level isn’t just a measure of speed but a direct reflection of the commitment to customer satisfaction, all organizations should aim for a high service level. The industry standard is 80/20, or answering 80% of contacts within 20 seconds. This indicates a contact center that is responsive and values customer satisfaction. These companies’ customers feel supported, which could foster loyalty and drive long-term success.

On the other hand, a low service level suggests that customers might be experiencing delays. Companies can capture and review service levels to identify opportunities for improvement and optimization.

Perform a customer sentiment analysis to improve the customer experience.

Businesses can track customer sentiment through direct feedback, surveys, social media posts, and conversations with customer service representatives to identify trends and patterns. This allows them to make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experiences.

That could even mean personalizing customer interactions in real time based on a specific customer’s mood. Customer sentiment analysis during a phone call can read into a customer’s tone and language to determine when they’re feeling frustrated or upset, allowing customer service agents to tailor their responses to the customer’s emotions and needs.

Analyzing and acting on customer sentiment can pay off down the road, resulting in increased customer loyalty, more word of mouth, a better brand reputation, and even more effective marketing strategies that truly resonate with customers.

Analyze virtual agent performance for insight into self-service success.

Self-service can be a game changer for an organization’s customer experience strategy. Instead of waiting for an agent to become available, customers can chat with a voice or digital bot to resolve their issues 24/7.

Self-service is a convenient and empowering solution, but to fully understand and optimize self-service success, companies must regularly analyze virtual agent performance.

When evaluating virtual agent performance, one example to consider is looking at the total number of contacts they handle and the percentage of those contacts that escalate to human agents. A low escalation rate could suggest that the virtual agent is effectively handling most problems without needing human assistance, indicating strong performance. However, it’s also possible that a low escalation rate signals that customers gave up on solving their issue through the virtual agent, resulting in abandoned interactions out of frustration.

Conversely, a high escalation rate might indicate that the virtual agent struggles with more complex inquiries or lacks the necessary information to fully assist customers. But it could also point to other issues, such as the virtual agent not understanding the initial request properly. In this case, an organization may want to investigate the reasons behind escalations and explore ways to enhance the virtual agent’s performance. This could involve updating its knowledge base, refining decision-making processes, or improving its ability to interpret and respond to customer questions accurately.

Study customer feedback to learn how it impacts customer satisfaction levels.

Contact centers should also use customer feedback to improve the customer experience, as actively gathering and analyzing feedback can provide businesses with insights into everything from customer perceptions and preferences to universal pain points. This allows companies to make informed decisions as they work to improve their products, services, and interactions with customers.

Often, companies will examine a wide variety of KPIs from a feedback flow, including:

• Net promoter score (NPS). NPS measures customer loyalty. Businesses can ask how likely their customers are to recommend the company to others to gain a better understanding of their overall sentiment for the brand. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to find the NPS.

• Average customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. The CSAT score gauges customers’ immediate satisfaction by asking them to rate their experience. This provides a direct insight into how well certain interactions meet customer expectations.

• Response rate. This rate indicates what percentage of customers participated in feedback surveys. Higher response rates indicate higher levels of customer engagement and allow for increasingly reliable feedback.

• Sent surveys/responses. Companies that request feedback in survey format will need to look at sent surveys/responses. Sent surveys refers to the number of post-interaction surveys that have been successfully delivered to contact persons and indicates that the data is being looked at and put to good use. Responses indicate the number of surveys collected from respondents with one or more answered questions. Companies can then dive into the answers to the survey questions themselves and take a closer look at the metadata associated with the interaction.

By regularly analyzing these KPIs, companies can identify trends, address issues promptly, and continuously refine their customer service strategies to ensure they remain aligned with their customers’ needs, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction levels and stronger customer relationships.

Measure customer analytics. Improve the customer experience.

Customer data can only do so much on its own. To make data collection worthwhile, companies need to carefully analyze it. Measuring customer analytics enables organizations to track performance and drive meaningful improvements across internal operations and the overall customer experience.

When businesses invest time in customer journey analytics, they get valuable insights into behavior, preferences, and pain points. The right customer experience software makes this process straightforward and simple. Remember—the true value of this data emerges when it’s carefully analyzed and applied to refine processes, personalize interactions, and anticipate customer needs.

Ready to get the most out of your customer data and improve the overall customer experience? Discover what Talkdesk can do for you!