How to measure your own contact mix

If your team assigns a call type to every service call, e-automate can tell you how often your customers call about paper jams. The help pages use copy quality, paper jam and power loss as example call types, and once you’ve been assigning them you can run reports on each one and see how often it comes up. So if someone asks about your copier service call volume, you probably have an answer.

What you probably don’t have is the same count for everything else that comes through the desk: meter reads that come back as email replies, customers calling to ask where their toner is, and billing questions sitting in a shared inbox until somebody gets to it (a problem dealers bring up with us a lot). Call types only apply to service calls, so contacts handled outside that workflow, like a lot of email, may not show up in call type reporting at all.

That total, split by type, is what I mean by contact mix. Here’s how I’d measure it.

Start with what e-automate already counts

Begin with call types, since e-automate already records them. Each one sits in one of seven categories: Corrective Maintenance, Courtesy Call, Install / Pickup, Other, Phone Fix, Preventive Maintenance and Shop Call. If your team has been consistent about assigning them, the call type reports give you the service call slice of the mix.

One limitation: the Service Statistics report, which breaks service activity down by rep, branch or company, only includes calls with at least one labor record. A call your dispatcher closed on the phone without logging labor won’t show up there, so if that report is your count, it may undercount the calls your desk resolved on the phone.

Then find what it doesn’t count

Meter reads are the one dealers we talk to most want off their desks. e-automate’s Meter Reading Request task in e-agent can send requests by email or fax, or build a phone list for your own people to call and collect meters for contract billing. For this exercise, count the replies and the follow-up calls as meter read contacts, separate from your service calls.

Devices on a data collection agent are different. With FMAudit connected, meters collected from the devices sync into e-automate billing, which cuts out the rekeying, and supply alerts can automate supply orders. So some of your meter and toner traffic may already be automated, and the rest comes in through inboxes, phones, fax or wherever else your customers reach you. Keep the two apart in the count, or the automated part will make the desk look busier than it is.

Billing and contract questions go in their own bucket. In our experience they’re the untidiest, mostly because so much of it runs over email.

Count one month, on every channel you have

MetricNet notes that first contact resolution is most often measured monthly, because a month is long enough to be statistically meaningful. I’d use the same window here. Then:

1. Pick five buckets: meter reads, toner and supplies, service calls, billing and contract, and other. Resist adding more until you’ve done one month.
2. List every way contacts reach you: phones, shared inboxes, fax, portal forms, anything else.
3. Pull service calls from e-automate by call type. If you use Service Statistics, check it against your call records for calls that were closed without labor.
4. Count every other channel for the same month into the same five buckets. If there’s too much to count by hand, sample a few days spread across the month, scale it up, and label the result as an estimate.
5. For each contact, mark whether it was resolved on the first contact. MetricNet’s service desk definition is the percentage of contacts resolved on the first interaction, which carries over well to a dealer desk. For email, it says an emerging industry convention counts resolution within one business hour as first contact resolution.
6. For the rate, leave out contacts the desk could never have resolved remotely, like a break/fix call that needs a tech on site. MetricNet calls this Net FCR.

What you end up with is a table: five rows, a count and a first-contact rate for each.

What the table is for

The rows to look at first are the ones with a high count and a high first-contact rate. Those may be routine answers (a meter, an order status, a contract status) that a person still had to handle. Check a sample before you assume that.

Meter reads and toner orders are the kind of contact we built Auralis for. It handles meter reads, toner and service calls around the clock and writes them straight into e-automate, and your people only step in on the exceptions.

Once you have the month’s total, put it into our Service Desk ROI Calculator along with the size of your dispatch and service team. Those are the only two numbers it asks for.

Sources

• ECI, e-automate online help (version 250): Creating Call Types, Service Statistics, Configuring Meter Reading Requests, Integrating FMAudit with E-automate.
• MetricNet, First Contact Resolution Rate | Metric of the Month, Jul 17, 2018.
• Auralis product information and conversations with dealers (internal).