The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Customer Care

Think Services' International Customer Management Institute has announced the release of its comprehensive study of contact center people management and operations. The ICMI 2008 Contact Center Operations Report compiles responses from a critical mass of contact center professionals from around the world.

The results pinpointed some positives and promise, while shining a spotlight on even more opportunities for improvement — some of which are glaring. Some examples of the good, the bad and the ugly practices uncovered by the report:

The good:

--The vast majority of centers recognize the importance of call monitoring.

--Most centers formally reward/recognize agents who consistently meet or exceed key objectives.

--Most centers correlate employee reward/recognition with improved service quality, higher customer satisfaction and greater agent morale/job satisfaction.

The bad:

--The majority of centers rely on internal quality monitoring, rather than external customer surveys, to measure customer satisfaction.

--Only two in five centers bother to measure agent satisfaction.

--One in four centers have no disaster recovery or business continuity plan in place.

And the ugly:

--In nearly three out of four centers, leaders are rarely held accountable for agent retention.

--Only 39% measure first-call resolution (FCR), considered one of the most important contact center metrics.

--One in three contact centers surveyed do not measure customer satisfaction.

More information on customer care can be found at http://www.supportindustry.com/