How Long Should You Be Spending on Service Calls? This Will Tell You!
How to get your contact centre’s priorities straight and put the focus on excellent service, not just reducing call times.
“Just give me the bottom line.”
How many times have you heard that frustrating phrase in your life? Sure, the bottom line is important; in business, moving away from a focus on cold, hard facts and figures often leads to disaster. But in the contact centre, there is often so great a focus on metrics and KPIs that customer service and satisfaction end up at the bottom of your list of priorities — intentionally or otherwise.
If you clicked on this article because the title led you to believe we were going to give you a magic formula and solve for x — the mysterious perfect length for your contact centre’s service calls — we’re sorry to disappoint you.
The truth is, there is no magic formula to determine the ideal service call length. Not only that, but we’re here to tell you that this metric should be moved down on your priorities list. Read on to find out why.
Call Length
In theory, a shorter average call length means your client service centre is doing better on the ever-popular “bottom line.” Reducing call length reduces airtime costs and frees up agents to handle other inquiries. At first glance, reducing call length seems like a noble effort and a goal you’d like to start working toward right away.
However, a laser focus on reducing the length of your service calls comes with a great risk: if agents are driven to reduce call time at all costs, the costs are actually quite great. What if they do reduce call length, but in so doing they miss vital details or information that prevents them from fully resolving the customer’s initial inquiry?
Dangers of a “Quick Call Time” Approach
Harris Interactive unearthed this sobering statistic: 89 percent of consumers surveyed report that they started doing business with a competing company as a result of an unsatisfactory service experience elsewhere. You read that right: nearly nine out of ten consumers have jumped ship due to poor customer service.
If you’ve made reducing call time your top priority, your reps may be slowly chipping away at call duration and producing some savings. But at what cost?
- What if their narrow focus on getting the customer off the line means they fail to give callers all the information they need?
- What if the 15 percent of time taken off your average call length results in a corresponding drop in customer satisfaction?
- What if the reduced call time results in a drop in your first call resolution (FCR) numbers?
That’s a lot of “what ifs,” but the truth is that excessive preoccupation with reducing service call time leads to these very issues. Rushing a customer off the line means agents can’t focus on a crucial factor: fully resolving the issue on the first contact. Unnecessary repeat calls lead to:
- Greater expense for your client service centre
- More agents tied up dealing with issues that should have been handled fully the first time
- Customer frustration due to having to call back a second (or third!) time to resolve an issue
Where to Put Your Focus
In the contact centre, customer service is job one. Your focus should always be principally on resolving your customers’ problems completely the first time. If your agents have been led down the primrose path of reducing service call length at all costs, they’re taking your call centre in a dangerous direction due to your mistaken belief that reducing call length is job one.
Customers don’t want to have to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary to have their questions, problems, or complaints answered and resolved completely. They certainly don’t want to have to call back again and again due to overly eager service agents who have rushed them off the line while aiming to reduce their service call length and keep their managers happy.
To ensure the happiest customers and the highest-functioning client service centre, shift your focus from reducing call length to boosting FCR numbers. Customer research conducted by consulting firm Service Quality Measurement Group found that contact centres see a 1 percent improvement in customer satisfaction for every corresponding 1 percent improvement in FCR. You can’t get much more of a direct correlation than that.
For more information on how to get your contact centre’s priorities back in line, download our free white paper.
