Annie Tsai

Single Call Resolution is commonly used in customer service centers to measure an employee’s effectiveness with drilling through the call queue. This is a very one-sided measurement of things that matter to the company like:

1. Employee Effectiveness – Is the company getting the most productivity per dollar?
2. Cost to Service a Customer – How short can we make these calls so the cost to service this customer is as small as possible?
3. Assumed Satisfaction – Companies often assume that a call marked “resolved” in a single call means that the customer is satisfied with the resolution.

#3 is the primary offender in my book, and is why companies need to have a qualitative measurement of “resolution satisfaction” with each case that is closed “resolved” in the customer service center.

Many companies go a step further and ask some sort of “Net Promoter” question with the intent of understanding if these customers have become more or less loyal after a specific interaction. Depending on your business, it may not be necessary to invest in measuring this type of metric. For instance, companies who sell in a B2B model might want to focus on ensuring Users of your products and services are extremely satisfied with usability and support, while with Decision Makers and Influencers, you focus on increasing loyalty.

Minimally, round out your service center success metrics by adding a component that measures how satisfied customers are with the “quality of care”, “ability to resolve”, or “overall resolution satisfaction”. You might find that by allowing your service reps to stay on the phone for 30 seconds longer, you see a marked improvement in your satisfaction scores. Worth the investment?