This has been a question in the world of customer service for years and never seems to be fully flushed out with a clear winner. Maybe because, there really is no clear winner and there needs to be a nice balance for a customer service group to be successful in terms of their customer experience and their duty to the company to keep costs in check.
Efficiency metrics have for many years ruled the roost when it comes to measuring the success of a service environment for most any company. How fast did I answer my calls/emails/chats? How fast did my agents handle the calls that they took that day? How fast did my service reps wrap up a call and document the results of the call? How quickly were agents able to roll a truck for service when they found out it was not something they could fix on the phone?
All of these items are important in measuring the costs of your service org, but do they really measure the success of your service org in terms of your customers perception?
The position that I would take in this age old argument is that effectiveness must be the foundation of your service organization and then when that has been put in place, you should move on to creating efficiencies that build on that effectiveness.
I have said this before, but I will say it again. What do customers want when they call your service group? They want their issue resolved then and there. As we all know, that is not always possible, but it becomes much more possible when you start using that metric as your baseline for how you are servicing your customer. If they want their issue resolved the first time they call/email/chat, then shouldn't that be the metric that we are tracking to?
I would never make the case that we should throw efficiencies out the window, but I would say that they only become useful, when we have set in motion with our service reps and our management that we are going to try to solve the problem the first time and then get incrementally better and faster at solving the problem.
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