Measure and Motivate the Right Contact Center Agent Behaviors

Increasingly banks must operate in a multi-channel environment.  While the changing role of the branch, combined with automated channels such as online and mobile, are getting a lot of attention, there remains a key role for the contact center in delivering an effective customer experience.  Central to this key role is designing an effective customer experience, comprised of the right sales and service behaviors – those which influence customer attitudes and behaviors in a profitable way yielding the most return on investment.

To provide direction with respect to what sales and service behaviors will yield the most return on investment, Kinesis conducted a series of mystery shops to identify which sales and service behaviors have the most influence on purchase intent. In addition to observing specific sales and service behaviors, mystery shoppers were also asked to rate how the call would have influenced their purchase intent if they had been a real customer. This purchase intent rating was then used as means of calculating the strength of the relationship between each behavior and purchase intent.

To determine the relationship between these service attributes and purchase intent, the data for these different studies was cross-tabulated by the purchase intent rating and subjected to significance testing. [i]

When the percentage of calls in which purchase intent significantly increased is tested against the percentage of calls where purchase intent significantly decreased, nearly all the sales and service attributes are statistically significant at or above a 95% confidence level.

The differences between the highest and lowest purchase intent for product knowledge and ease to understanding explanations are the most significant, while a professional greeting is the least significant.

Dividing these behaviors into rough quartiles and comparing them side-by-side, reveals some interesting observations:

The attributes with the most significant differences between high and low purchase intent ratings appear to be those associated with reliability and empathy.  It appears mystery shoppers valued such “core” attributes as product knowledge or interest/enthusiasm for the customer.  They seem to be less concerned with more peripheral service attributes, such as asking for names, etc.  Influencing purchase intent is not as simple as merely using the customer’s name or answering the phone within a short period of time.  Rather it is a much more challenging undertaking of being competent in your job and having the customer’s best interests at heart.

[i] Significance testing determines if any differences observed are the result of actual differences in the populations measured rather than the result of normal variation.  Without getting into too much detail, significance testing produces a test statistic to determine the probability that differences observed are statistically significant.  A test statistic above 1.96 equates to a 95% confidence level, which means there is a 95% chance any differences observed are the result of actual differences in the populations measured rather than normal variation.  For all practical purposes a test statistic over 3.1 means there is 100% chance the differences observed are statistically significant (although in reality the probability never reaches 100%).  Finally, in interpreting the following analysis, it is important note that test statistics are not lineal.  A test statistic of two is not twice as significant as a test statistic of one.  The influence on significance decreases as the test statistic increases.  However, the test statistic does give us an opportunity to rank the service attributes by their statistical significance.