Pharma leaders and contact center managers constantly monitor, review, and optimize contact center performance to deliver positive customer experiences and maintain a competitive advantage.
Benchmarking to identify the best business practices in the industry is essential for the success of any contact center. However, benchmarked insights can be difficult to obtain and even more difficult to make sense of if you don’t know where to start.
Let’s break down what benchmarked insights are and discuss how you can use them to improve contact center performance and the customer experience.
What are benchmarked insights?
Pharma leaders and contact center managers have access to a treasure trove of real-time and historical performance data from their contact center. You’ve most likely established contact center KPIs or other metrics of success you use to sort through this data. But how can you turn those raw numbers into actionable insights?
This is where benchmarking those insights becomes important. In a nutshell, benchmarking involves comparing your contact center’s practices and performance metrics to those of similar companies. Benchmarked insights act as a key tool for measuring performance and identifying areas for improvement, especially for companies operating in a knowledge-based market.
By understanding how your contact center compares to those of your competitors and companies in the same industry, you can define clear opportunities to improve your contact center performance and deliver a better experience for your reps and your customers.
How are benchmarked insights determined?
At Centerfirst, we use Enhanced Quality Monitoring (eQM) to monitor contact center interactions and measure performance based on each client’s unique goals. Because we are an independent, third-party provider focusing solely on the pharma industry, we can provide a transparent, unbiased view into contact center performance.
Using our team’s extensive pharma experience, we use this data to develop actionable 3D InsightsTM that you can use to train your reps and improve your contact center. We benchmark those insights against hundreds of thousands of interactions we’ve monitored in the pharma industry to ensure your contact center is getting valuable information that helps you stay at the top of the game.
How are benchmarked insights used?
Benchmarked insights offer an effective way to measure contact center performance and identify opportunities for improvement. eQM goes beyond traditional contact center monitoring to deliver insights at the agent, customer, and program levels. With these three-dimensional insights, pharma leaders can make proactive decisions about their contact centers with confidence and improve the customer experience.
At the agent level: improving first contact resolution
For example, the global first contact resolution benchmark — a metric used to measure customer inquiries or problems resolved during first contact with an agent — is approximately 70%. After an initial review of agent performance, you may find that your first contact resolution rate is only 50%. In this case, our team would work with you to monitor each interaction and identify the gaps in information — whether caused by agents who need more coaching or something else — that lead to unresolved issues. With these insights, pharma leaders can train their agents to better address customer needs and boost their first contact resolution rate.
At the program level: addressing long hold times
At the program level, one of the most common challenges contact centers face is long hold times which can lead to dissatisfied customers and overwhelmed agents. In turn, pharma leaders may experience a longer average call duration which may produce a need to hire additional agents to handle more volume, both of which end up costing time and money.
Pulling on years of experience in the pharma industry, Centerfirst can help compare your contact center’s hold times and call durations to those across the industry. Then, by combining these insights with agent and customer insights (3D Insights), we work with your team to identify and remedy program gaps that might be leading to higher contact center costs and lower customer experiences.
At the customer level: enhancing customer sentiment
For the third level — customer insights — many pharma leaders look at customer sentiment as a strong KPI. Positive sentiment can go a long way in building trust with customers and turning them into advocates for the brand.
After monitoring customer interactions across a number of channels, a contact center manager might find that their customer sentiment score is low when compared to industry standards. Knowing this, Centerfirst can perform a sentiment analysis to identify leading indicators of positive customer sentiment, which pharma leaders can then use to coach their agents. For one pharma client, we found that for their inside sales program, two out of 15 skills — engaging in two-way dialogue and managing calls with active listening — had the highest correlation to positive HCP sentiment.
Benchmarked insights are an important and invaluable tool for measuring contact center performance and ensuring customers are receiving the best experience possible. As an independent provider, Centerfirst makes it easy to benchmark your contact center against others in the industry to improve performance and customer experience.
Contact us to learn more about how Centerfirst can help you develop benchmarked insights and transform your contact center.