What are the Key Customer Experience Metrics of 2024?

Cutting Average Handling Time through Self-Service

Average Handling Time measures the time taken to complete a customer interaction. This includes time spent talking to customers, putting customers on hold, conferencing with other agents, completing post-call wrap-up, divided by the total number of calls handled.

Generally, the lower the Average Handling Time, the better. Lower AHT means more customers supported within a given time period, which means shorter queues, which means fewer customers trapped in queues.

In 2024, the focus is going to be on driving down Average Handling Time through improved self-service options:

• Through intelligent routing, customers can be pointed to the best available outcome quickly and accurately via Natural Language Processing (NLP) and voice recognition. For the simplest inquiries, online portals, apps, or chatbots can resolve customer inquiries.

• That doesn’t mean that AHT will immediately fall, however. As the simplest inquiries are routed to automated outcomes, only the most complex of difficult will be routed to agents. As the average contact becomes more complex, AHT might end up rising.

• Conversational Machine Agents allow for fluent automated experiences, supporting customers through self-service processes.

• With 65% of customers preferring to resolve simple inquiries online, the appetite exists for improved automated customer experiences.

Efficiency per capita is a constant concern for the contact center. But, self-service isn’t the only area of improvement. New technologies are making agents more efficient than ever.

Reducing After Call Work Time

Your agents aren’t answering calls 24/7; highly manual after-call work takes up a huge proportion of their time. In fact, on average, agents spend 30-40% of their working day documenting transactions. And time spent on data entry means time not spent answering phones. That means fewer calls taken, more customers waiting in the queue, which in turn prompts frustrations. Customers who don’t get the support they expect aren’t going to be customers much longer.

2024 is going to see an increased focus on the use of technology to crack down on after call work. Whether that’s generative AI-powered transcription and summarization, or unified interfaces that make data entry easy and efficient, new technologies will open up opportunities to boost agent per capita efficiency.

• Tracking the time from one call to the next will give you an idea of how long your agents are spending on after call work. Once you start measuring, there’s a couple of steps to cut down on it.

• Implement a single, intuitive interface. 80% of agents say they use multiple systems during their working day; by bringing all contact center functionality into one interface, you can reduce time wasted switching between multiple disparate systems.

• Leverage new technology, such as generative AI, to enable instant transcription and summarization. GenAI could be used to prefill forms, generative follow-up contacts, or pluck out essential details post-interaction.

Technology will bring huge changes to the way we approach customer experience metrics in 2024. That doesn’t mean you can lose track of the human element.

Learning from Agent Utilization Rate

Agent Utilization Rate (AUR) measures how much time agents spend answering calls as a proportion of their total working day. At first, this might resemble AHT, but with one key difference. Where AHT focusses on the interaction, AUR focusses on the agent.

The agent attrition crisis will remain front-and-center in 2024, as contact center leaders work to retain and develop top talent. Agents are increasingly prioritizing their own wellbeing when picking a place to work. Pushing your agents to their limits to boost your customer experience metrics risks causing burnout, and hemorrhaging talent as a result.

• In 2024, contact centers must strike a balance between boosting performance and combatting burnout. Tracking Agent Utilization Rate will be essential here; outside of unexpected demand surges, looking out for agent welfare is a great way to improve retention rates.

• Technology offers a host of ways to support your agents. A cloud contact center solution, for instance, can enable secure remote working from any location, giving your agents flexibility in how they work.

• Levels of customer contact look likely to increase in 2024. Preserving your experienced talent will be essential to meet this increased level of demand. Do right by your agents, and they’ll do right by you.

• To understand how your Agent Utilization Rate will depend on your particular agents. Measuring agent sentiment is absolutely essential; regular feedback surveys, wellbeing trackers, and personal development plans should guide the way you approach agent wellbeing.