I found these pictures by Face Research to be very interesting. I hope you do too. I was thinking that if we can take pictures of people and average them together, then I wonder if there is value in taking customers and averaging them together too. Is there such a thing as an average customer? Of the hundreds or thousands of unique phone calls that we take in our contact centers each day, can they really be averaged and paint a good picture of an average "contact" or "interaction"? I think so.
Measuring the average customer is what we are doing every day when we calculate average handle time, or abandon rates. We are essentially making a judgement about what the average call or caller looks like when we take each individual contact into consideration. In fact, we even see similar variations across industries, just like we see variation yet similarity in the faces of different countries. So it is also that the average handle time in support industries are different than in direct response industries but similar within the same industry. So, benchmarking yourself with another contact center is good...as long as their "average customer" is like your "average customer".
Do you benchmark your "averages" with other companies or industries? How to you go about measuring your average customer? Please share with me at greg.smart@incontact.com or comment below.
