Contact center research firm ContactBabel has unveiled its latest market study: Exceeding UK Customer Expectations 2023-24.
Released in partnership with Enghouse Interactive, the report captures a snapshot of how “hundreds” of UK-based contact centers match up to current customer expectations.
Inside, there are many fascinating threads to pull at. Those include emerging trends in channel choice, customer complaints, and agent behaviors.
Yet, perhaps most eye-catching is its latest contact center metric data.
Now, contact centers must be cautious when using these figures for benchmarking. After all, service operations often track metrics differently. Moreover, some contact centers will have more self-service than others, influencing KPIs such as handling times.
Nevertheless, year-on-year trending offers insight into the market’s evolution and may highlight opportunities for brands to differentiate and excel.
With that in mind, here are a handful of the UK standards for cornerstone contact center metrics, alongside commentary and ideas to move the needle for each.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Industry Standard: 77 percent
Contact centers measure FCR in several ways, such as running an analytics initiative, sending post-contact surveys, and tracking repeat contacts.
There are even discrepancies between the measurement methods. For instance, in the last example, the timeframe for what the contact center considers a “repeat contact” often differs from one operation to another.
As such, external benchmarking is tricky. Yet, as an overall trend, FCR has stayed on a downward trajectory since the mid-noughties – according to ContactBabel. That is despite all the innovations thrust into the contact center space.
The influx of self-service tools taking more transactional interactions away from the contact center is likely to have played a significant role.
Yet, the trend is a concern given that FCR and short wait times are what customers want most from customer service interactions – as per further ContactBabel research.
The good news is that this year, FCR rates have started to slowly pick up again in recent years. Potential reasons for this include advancements in agent-assist technologies and the rise of UCaaS integrations, making it easier for agents to lean on the expertise of external employees.
Yet, there are many other techniques contact centers can leverage to improve FCR – as below.
Ideas to Improve First Contact Resolution
- Split FCR across different customer intents to spot the queries agents struggle to resolve most. Use this insight to inform new coaching materials and knowledge content.
- Consider how to feed agents with more customer context. There are various strategies for this, such as placing a bot in the IVR queue to capture information ahead of a call or enabling customers to share digital media – i.e., images/videos of the problem – during interactions.
- Connect the contact center with a UCaaS platform – like Microsoft Teams – so agents can leverage subject matter expert (SME) insights during customer conversations.
Average Handling Time (AHT) (Voice Only)
Industry Standard: 426 seconds for service / 516 seconds for sales
AHT has almost doubled over the past 18 years in customer service, rising from 220 seconds in 2004 to 426 seconds in 2022.
Like with FCR, this trend – highlighted in the chart below - likely reflects the rise in self-service and digital messaging sweeping up the more simple contacts.
Yet, interestingly, ContactBabel also finds that excessively long calls are wreaking havoc with this metric, soaking up agent time and contributing to high ASA rates (see below).
Contact centers recognizing this issue should perhaps consider targeting outliers in AHT as part of a quality assurance (QA) exercise to spotlight the causes.
In sales, the trend is similar, with AHT rising from 280 seconds in 2006 to 516 seconds in 2022.
