How am i doing?: A new framework to effectively measure the performance of automated customer care contact centers

Abstract

Satisfying callers' goals and expectations is the primary objective of every customer care contact center. However, quantifying how successfully interactive voice response (IVR) systems satisfy callers' goals and expectations has historically proven to be a most difficult task. Such difficulties in assessing automated customer care contact centers can be traced to two assumptions made by most stakeholders in the call center industry: 1. Performance can be effectively measured by deriving statistics from call logs; and 2. The overall performance of an IVR can be expressed by a single numeric value. This chapter introduces an IVR assessment framework which confronts these-misguided assumptions head on and shows how they can be overcome. Our new framework for measuring the performance of IVR-driven call centers incorporates objective and subjective measures. Using the concepts of hidden and observable measures, we demonstrate in this chapter how it is possible to produce reliable and meaningful performance metrics which provide insights into multiple aspects of IVR performance. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.