Measuring the shift left of a digital transformation journey has always been a challenge for service organizations. Part of the issue has been their reluctance to change the currency of their service organization from the case to the customer service engagement. We see this often when organizations quantify their shift left in terms of case deflection, rather than issues resolved by service channel (self-service, community forum, assisted, and others). Imagine if the banking industry quantified their ATM transactions as teller deflections. They might have been tempted 50 years ago, but now they measure their customer engagements by their various channels—direct deposit, online banking, ATMs, bank branches, etc.
Several members of the Consortium for Service Innovation have made the transition to measuring the customer issue resolved by their various service channels, but there was no standard way to measure these engagements. Over the past year, a group of 18 Consortium member companies met regularly to develop a measurement standard. Participating companies spanned many industries, including technology, online entertainment, financial services, and consumer services, and ranged in size from small to extremely large. We were also fortunate to have many of our Verified and Aligned vendors participate in this effort. Our focus for the first phase was quantifying the Self-Service channel. Amy Dotson from Sage, Christina Roosen from Akamai, and I were privileged to present the results of this first phase at our recent Member Summit – and you can find all the details in the Understanding Success by Channel paper.
The team developed a spreadsheet to standardize the metrics and calculations (figure 1). We started with the typical Agent Assist case metrics to ensure alignment with current metrics and maximize senior leadership acceptance. We did not want to replace the traditional service metrics; we wanted to expand them to better align to customer demand. This allows us to easily show comparative traffic and weighted averages across all channels for key service metrics. We didn’t just provide one method for each calculating each metric, rather we provided a choice of good, better, and best methods. This enables service organizations to get started right away measuring this critical channel and enhance their metrics over time. To further ease adoption, we broke the spreadsheet into three ares of focus:
- Traffic & Success: quantifying demand and demand met
- Length & Cost: quantifying key time and cost measurements
- Customer Experience: quantifying customer satisfaction, effort, and loyalty metrics
Many companies start with Traffic & Success and then move onto the other areas over time.
Metrics and calculation methods are documented in the Understanding Success by Channel paper. The documentation also includes the downloadable spreadsheet in the figure above, a glossary of terms, prerequisites, assumptions, and limitations. Consortium members also have access to a set of videos demonstrating the various measurement methods (log in required). We wish you well on your Digital Transformation journey and hope you take advantage of this measurement framework to track your progress.