We often hear that if productivity is driven up, customer experience will be sacrificed.

That is absolutely not the case.

It can happen if the focus is on the wrong things. If the focus on just one part of the productivity equation, such as driving down average call handling time, then yes, customers will suffer as agents hang up the phone or cut short a conversation in order to achieve quite meaningless measurements.

So if the productivity is high, we are generating a high number of well-served customers at the right cost. That can only be good for everybody.

There are two elements that have a big impact on productivity. First, how much of an agent’s time was converted into productive work. The second is how much of that work was used to service customers effectively?

The higher the productivity the higher the value the customer puts on their experience. Why? If the agent is ready when the customer calls, and if they actually solve the problem, the customer will go away satisfied with their experience.

Financial directors will be very happy too, because higher productivity means a lower cost per served customer. In practice it can be a little tricky to measure these things. This is just a nature of the business we are in. A typical contact has multiple systems, multiple data sources, and multiple different transactions that can take place.

This is where Customer Service Engineering can help.  Our people are trained to use Business Intelligence tools to connect up the data sources enabling an accurate, real time measure of your real productivity.