This is a guest post by Ashley Furness
Zappos is renowned worldwide as a standout performer in customer service, partially for the e-retailer’s unique approach to customer performance and productivity management. Zappos invests in its call centres, seeing them not as cost, but as an opportunity to market.
Recently, I sat down with the company’s Customer Loyalty Operations Manager Derek Carder. He explained to me that the company’s whole approach is to create loyalty by delivering “wow” moments and building emotional connections with its customers.
Here are four of the key performance indicators they use to monitor, track and improve their agents performance:
1. Total Call Time
Instead of focusing on call handle time and the number of customer queries that were taken, Zappos looks at the percentage of a time an agent spends on the phone. Agents are expected to spend at least 80% of their time in customer-facing communications. This measure – called personal service level – is a way to allow the team to use their time in the way they see best promotes customer loyalty.
Reps who meet this target get rewarded, while those who fall below the 80 percent line are coached.
2. Wow Moments
Zappos scores calls against a 100-point scale called the “Happiness Experience Form” which is based on answers to the following questions:
- Did the agent try to make a personal connection with the customer?
- Did they keep that connection going if the customer responded?
- Did they discover the customers real motivation for buying, and make sure that need was met?
- Was it a “wow experience”?
Agents are expected to achieve a 50-point average or higher. Again, agents earn incentives for meeting their goals, while under-performers will receive extra training.
3. Idle Chats
Zappos monitors periods of time when an agent has a chat session open even though the customer has long since disconnected from it. Carder said sometimes agents do this purposely to avoid responding.
This strategy of looking for idle chats zeroes in on the cause of un-productivity. When agents aren’t working customers have to wait longer and the longer they wait, the more apt they are to walk away with their business.
4. Attendance and Punctuality
Zappos uses a program called Panda to combat absenteeism. Employees receive a point for every day they miss work or come in late. Staff with zero points in any given period receive a number of paid hours off. These hours can be accrued and taken as an entire day.
How These Metrics Impact Customer Service
My primary take away is that Zappos have created metrics that emphasize building a relationship with the customer instead of rushing them through the call. At the same time, these KPIs still successfully improve performance and make employees feel appreciated and rewarded.
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Image by EricaJoy
Hey Ashley,
Thanks for a great post that looks under the ‘bonnet’ (‘hood’ in US parlance) and shows us what Zappos are doing with respect to their call centre metrics. Interesting to note that while many people, and they themselves, laud their culture they are still focusing some of their metrics on productivity and absenteeism.
Even with a company like Zappos, it seems that they still have to keep an eye on employees gaming the system from time to time.
Adrian
Hi Adrian, great to “see” you again. It was a really interesting article to work on, for sure. Agreed, particularly with the mining for idle chats. It really seems like they’ve zeroed in on these opportunities to “game the system” as you mentioned.
Thanks for reading! I hope all is well!
Hello Ashley
Many thanks for sharing this and giving me an insight into Zappos. What got my attention in particular is that if agents do right they get rewarded for example under the area of attendance/punctuality. So Zappos has created an incentive for the behaviour they want to show up to show up. And I agree that Zappos are using relationship metrics as opposed to cost/efficiency metrics.
Maz
Hi Maz,
Thanks for reading! The way I see it, it’s both – relationship metrics and cost/efficiency. The Happiness Form less so, but definitely with the idle chat monitoring and Panda program. I really like the idea of not measuring time to resolution. I’ve been on the phone with call center agents so many times and felt the push to get off the phone. This was made even worse when I found out in a separate call that they didn’t tell me about something that would have made my experience better.
Thanks for your comments!
Ashley
Useful resource about various call center metrics. I would appreciate it if you discuss the following in your next post:
Call center service level and
Estimated average call answering time and other call center metrics.
I am looking forward to your next post!
Thanks!
Hi Erica,
Thanks very much for reading. I can definitely take a look at some other common call center KPIs. I’m headed to an HP conference next week and am sitting down with one of their Customer Service execs. Perhaps he can share some insight.
Thanks!
Ashley