Analyst Perspectives

There are contact centers, and there is customer experience. They are not the same thing, even though we have a tendency to conflate them or at least discuss them in tandem for operational and planning purposes. This is mostly fine, but it does obscure one basic difference that will matter more as enterprises succeed at integrating contact centers into enterprise CX strategies. That difference is in metrics and, by extension, how we define success.

Contact centers are very good at measuring the speed and volume of interactions, using legacy key performance indicators like handle time, speed of answer, hold time and first-contact resolution. KPIs like these accomplish two goals. One, they give managers a way to control the costs of service delivery (mainly in headcount) and adjust in near real time. Two, they provide a rough guide to potential issues in the customer base: If hold times are increasing, you don’t need a survey to tell you that customers are likely to notice.

Those metrics are decades old and used because they work well. But the story they tell is incomplete. What’s true for an interaction may not be true for a broad customer relationship or life cycle. Or for many customers in aggregate over long periods. Also, an interaction’s “truth” is limited. Even measuring satisfaction is ambiguous. Are customers satisfied because they got what they wanted at the moment? Satisfied with this call but unhappy with the overall relationship? It’s a nuanced question that contact centers rarely have the time—or interest—to explore.

And that’s where contact center measurements clash with customer experience metrics (or complement them, if you’re feeling generous).

CX is, definitionally, an effort to centralize the strategy around customers, seeking to better control and monetize the relationships. Contact centers are usually viewed as cost centers to be optimized for efficiency but are increasingly seen as strategic assets that drive retention, loyalty and revenue growth. But as long as contact centers define success using KPIs based on doing more faster, they fail to inform peers in enterprise CX about the inherent capacity of the service interaction to achieve that retention, loyalty and growth.

I should note that this is not an either/or assessment. Many contact centers do collect and use data on things like customer effort, net promoters and lifetime value. As long as humans interact with customers, it will be necessary to measure handle time and things like that. My point is that these are no longer sufficient to describe the actual value that the contact center is delivering to the organization because traditional KPIs are built to describe what has happened, not to paint a picture of where a business has influence or impact around customer behavior.

We are entering a golden age of analytics, thanks largely to the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to examine the mountains of customer data generated by interactions. Sophisticated speech analytics and natural language processing can now extract sentiment, intent and predictive signals from customer interactions. Then, you have integrated systems that track customer journeys across channels and, over time, reveal causal relationships between service experiences and business outcomes. Contact center management may not have an immediate need for the rich data environment that they now swim in, but CX teams focused on sales and marketing certainly do.

By 2027, customer experience software platforms will be distinguished more by their analytic capabilities than their communications tools. CX teams are moving toward analytics that capture immediate service quality and long-term business impact.

For example, how many contact center managers measure something as complex and interesting as the cost-to-serve to value-generated ratio? This metric creates an important context by describing the relationship between what you put into the process (contact center costs) and what the business as a whole gets from it. This should matter to contact center people because this assessment can help them make the argument for better resourcing service teams in light of the value derived. It also points to how excessive cost-cutting can harm valuable customer relationships (in ways that may not be obvious).

This is just one of many potential KPIs that can better shed light on the service process and how it and the CX processes that surround it are connected. I’m not suggesting that contact centers chase every new KPI that emerges. Instead, leaders should be alert to tools that better describe the more complex reality around customer experiences: These interactions are part of a larger story that extends throughout the customer life cycle. And many teams and people influence customer value and behavior. Only by examining the spread of input and outputs can you truly understand the contact center’s power to engage effectively with customers, the costs that are required and the benefits that accrue.

As we enter a period in which agentic AI promises to refashion many processes around customer experience, CX and contact center teams need to reexamine how they measure success from those processes. The explosion of automation is already having a positive impact on many costly activities related to customers. It’s long past time to ensure that CX is measured more broadly to reflect successful enterprise-focused outcomes.

This is a mind shift but requires some adaptation as well. A successful pivot to broader metrics requires organizations to update systems to capture and report new KPIs and to train teams to understand and act on these measurements. Performance management frameworks require redesign to incorporate outcome-based KPIs, with coaching approaches emphasizing customer impact rather than purely operational efficiency. Compensation and recognition programs should evolve to reinforce desired behaviors, rewarding customer outcomes alongside activity metrics.

Taking these steps doubles the benefits by improving operational performance while building lasting, measurable value in the customer base.

Regards,

Keith Dawson