Optimizing CX workflows using performance benchmarks

The Covid-19 pandemic upended customer operations, forcing many customer experience (CX) teams to pivot away from highly-controlled call centers and disperse into remote-work arrangements.   

Now the Omicron variant has once more scrambled efforts to bring employees back into offices. Even when the pandemic eventually subsides, surveys show that many CX agents likely will prefer to continue some sort of remote or hybrid work arrangement. 

To manage CX workflows among their distributed employees, companies are doubling down on software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In its 2021 Businesses at Work report, Okta found that larger companies now deploy an average of 175 apps.

As apps proliferate, CX operations are becoming more complex. Yet most companies have little visibility into their CX workflows, which complicates PCI compliance and makes it harder for companies to improve CX efficiency, productivity and outcomes. 

Too often, CX leaders lack sufficient high-quality data to answer these four key operational questions:

1. Which metrics are most significant for high-performing CX teams?
2. How are customer operations teams inadvertently sabotaging team productivity and undermining customer value?
3. What impact do various processes and technology really have on agent productivity?
4. What are the biggest untapped opportunities to make customer operations and CX teams more productive?

Providing vital insights to growing CX teams

Fin’s CX Insider Report: Customer Operations Benchmarks for 2022 shows that many companies are missing out on massive opportunities to improve the productivity of their CX teams, reduce costs and deliver better customer experiences.

The report contains detailed findings based on an analysis of tens of millions of hours of real-world data collected through Fin’s Work Insights Platform, a lightweight browser plugin that enables leaders to collect data that helps them to improve productivity and performance on CX and operations teams. 

The information collected on how agents work across any number of SaaS applications enables leaders to boost productivity by improving capacity planning, reducing distractions and streamlining SaaS workflows.

A solution such as Fin’s Work Insights Platform enables leaders to drill deep into CX data to identify top agents and see which processes and tools those agents use to excel in their roles.

CX leaders can then assess their own CX performance against industry norms by comparing internal findings against the data in the CX Insider Report: Customer Operations Benchmarks for 2022. The report goes far beyond customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to reveal industry standards around other key metrics including handle time, data loss, agent utilization and policy adherence.

The CX Insider Report report shows that:

• An average CX employee spends only 66 per cent of their day actively working to resolve cases or tickets.
• 26 per cent of cases require five or more human touchpoints.
• A majority of cases requires at least four unique applications to solve.
• A clear correlation exists between slower page load times and lower agent utilization.

By combining insights generated through Fin’s Work Insights Platform with the industry data in the report, customer operations leaders can benchmark their own CX performance and identify high-priority areas where they have the greatest room for improvement.