Published on May 16, 2022
Aligned to its cultural pillar ‘Benchmark & Better the Best’, Tata CLiQ wanted to assess their customer service functional maturity and in December 2021, Tata CLiQ approached TBExG to learn best practices and benchmarks across its key customer service performance metrics. The company was keen to understand the following KPI’s:
- Customer service agent profile and associated costs at the contact centre
- Ratio of inbound contacts to transactions or inbound contacts per orders on your portal for voice/chat/email
- Average handling time for inbound voice/chat/email queues
- Service levels for inbound voice/chat/email queues
- Repeat interactions received from customers on each channel
- First time resolution for inbound queues
- Efforts/touchpoints agents have to make to resolve tickets
- Average resolution time/resolution rate
To support Tata CLiQ in its endeavours, at the very outset TBExG shared APQC’s ‘Benchmarks-on-Demand’. Organisations use ‘Benchmarks-on-Demand’ to understand the overall performance of a process or function. APQC's ‘Benchmarks on Demand’ helps select up to three discrete peer groups from region, revenue, and industry peer types and obtain a ‘combined’ peer group.
The assessment report from APQC contained validated benchmarking information, including the performance relative to its peers in separate industry, region, and organisation-size peer groups. In addition, qualitative information related to key business practices and enablers were included in the report, which helped Tata CLiQ identify the performance gaps in their key metrics and performance measures to improve.
The report highlighted KPIs related to call centre management in the categories of cost effectiveness, process efficiency and cycle time for Tata CLiQ compared to all participants as under:
- 25th percentile or bottom performers: This represents the performance level below which 25 percent of all responses fall
- Median: The median performance level for all participants in the database. The median reflects the value below and above which there is an equal number of values
- 75th percentile or top performers: This represents the performance level below which 75 percent of all responses fall.
TBExG, further facilitated interactions with Tata 1mg, Tata SIA Airlines and AirAsia India respectively.
On January 13, 2022, the team from Tata 1mg, Anubhav Mehrotra, VP - Consumer Experience; Nikhil Doegar, VP - Strategy Planning and Analytics; and Siji George, Senior Manager; shared their best practices and operational call centre metrics.
This was followed with another session on January 18, 2022, in which Sonia Bhardwaj, Head - Customer Experience; and Jyoti Dhingra, Senior Customer Relations Manager, both from Tata SIA Airlines shared their practices around queries raised by Tata CLiQ. Tata CLiQ also received benchmarking data across the key metrics from AirAsia India.
From these sessions, Tata Cliq could pick up the following learnings:-
- Tata CLiQ is performing better than industry average and remains in top quartile for service parameters like agent attrition & tenure, costs to perform CS operations and service levels
- Tata CLiQ could improve in areas like IVR self-service and seat utilisation and cross industry benchmark levels
- Best practices from group companies to replicate: ‘Agent Empowerment Guide’ from Tata SIA, ‘Assisted-digital channel adoption’ by 1mg and ‘Service level excellence’ from Air Asia
Participant Speak
Thanks to the TBExG team, these internal and external benchmarking initiatives help us in being aware and proactive about adoption of best practices. Aligned to the cultural pillar ‘Benchmark & Better the Best’, Tata CLiQ now has a portal ‘BenchmarQ Box’ to aggregate and unify all insights from various benchmarking initiatives and TBExG has been a pivotal partner.
— Ashish Himthani, Head - Customer Service Experience, Tata Cliq