As more companies are embracing the move to social customer service (see John Ragsdale’s SSPA survey results on Technology Spend), we might pause and ask how this trend will likely impact our traditional thinking about measuring “call center success.” Esteban Kolsky writes an interesting piece in his Passion for Customer Service blog on why companies might rethink traditional metrics, given that these are no longer likely to align well with our current business strategy. What Kolsky points out is that tried and true customer service metrics, like "mean time" to "resolve tickets," are well-established and hard to change. Incentive systems are often built on these metrics; call center infrastructure has been fine-tuned to support these. So what do we do with our traditional customer service metrics as we move towards social service?

A lot has been written about the ROI of shifting to social service (see our previous blog post on The ROI of Community Based Customer Service). One take away from the ROI discussion on metrics involves how to begin measuring how much a customer community is helping companies answer service requests. Another might be to measure how much a community contributes to the overall effectiveness of a knowledge base. Certainly, with the right tools in place like the Helpstream Integrated Waterfall ROI Report, it is quite easy to measure these things. But is layering in new metrics, such as these, on top of old metrics when thinking about social service sufficient? Is this just a case of simply enhancing and extending service metrics or is this a case of a complete overhaul?

Michael Maoz of Gartner has been analyzing and writing about Social CRM for many years. Anyone who wants to understand how their customer service metrics might change when implementing social service might want to track his work. While recognizing that most call centers’ metrics have been driven by the desire for greater efficiencies over the last 20 years, he aptly notes that one cost of these efforts has been to stop listening to the customer (see his post Why Your Twitter and Social CRM Efforts Will Fail ). The price for not listening to customers he points out, is the bashing of poor customer service that occurs in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Clearly there is a cost associated with this public form of complaining many companies are not capturing. A good question to begin asking is how we develop metrics around listening to customers. This is not the kind of metric that will drive further efficiencies, but it may well save our brands and lower our customer attrition rates.

Whatever the new metrics are, it’s clear we need to begin thinking how the move towards social service should be measured. Will call center efficiency remain the primary focus for how we measure success, or will we develop a whole new set of metrics designed to capture how well we are listening to and engaging customers in how service is delivered? I suspect as with any business process transformation, there will likely be a period of overlapping metrics as companies work their way through which metrics help motivate and track the desired results.

How are you re-thinking your customer service metrics as you move to social service? Let us know your thoughts.