Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - June 2008
View Online
Contact center industry performance standards may not mesh with customers’ standards for service excellence. Identifying the gap between the two and using new tools to close the gap can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Does this sound familiar? Your customer service agents have completed a new training program and their productivity scores went up, just as you’d hoped. Everything looks good until the customer survey scores come in — and you see that customer satisfaction is down. How, you ask?
This scenario is familiar to many contact center operators around the world. Evidence is mounting that there is a large gap between how a contact center scores itself and how customers score their experiences with that center. A recent survey conducted by Convergys Corporation revealed that more than 60 percent of contact center managers have experienced this gap.
For example, the fact that your agents are handling a larger volume of calls more quickly may mean that a metric on your company’s scorecard (i.e., handle time) has improved. However, if customers need to call in frequently to ask questions or to take advantage of offerings, then it’s likely they’ll be dissatisfied by initiating so many calls to meet their needs. It’s also likely that all those calls are costing more than you’d like.
Perhaps the solution is to view customer care as a relationship management strategy. This enables a broader understanding of how to deliver a superior service experience and eliminate the gap between agent productivity scores and customer satisfaction scores.
The concept of relationship management is based on the premise that business success derives from optimizing the value of relationships with customers. It is no longer sufficient to view customer interactions as an organizational cost. Customers seek relationships with companies that know their preferences and can deliver superior experiences on demand. The company that anticipates needs and prevents unnecessary calls creates customer value through delivering an optimal service experience, improving satisfaction, and reducing the cost of service.
Aligning your customer care operations to optimize customer relationships involves understanding the customer experience across four dimensions. These include: operational excellence, strategy development/transformation, technology enablement, and analytics and business intelligence. Focusing the lens inward from these broad areas, we recommend a three-phased strategy: (1) performing a contact center assessment to measure the “fitness level” of your center; (2) calibrating quality assurance scores with customer satisfaction scores to identify gaps between these two critical data sources; and (3) applying root cause analysis and other tools to understand (and change) factors that drive customer experiences.
Getting the Diagnosis for Your Call Center
The purpose of undertaking a customer care diagnostic is to measure the operational efficiency and customer focus of your center before you implement any radical changes. The saying “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” often applies here.
The idea behind the assessment is to give your contact center a low-cost evaluation. This diagnostic can be done with a small evaluation team conducting a four- to six-week analysis on your operations, benchmarking how various aspects of customer management compare to industry standards.
Our firm assesses contact centers by measuring 25 indicators of customer care spanning four domains:
-
Business process alignment measures include determining whether your product offerings and strategy are customer focused.
-
Talent management measures evaluate your talent acquisition, training and retention methods.
-
Customer interaction measures evaluate channel management.
-
Care infrastructure measures evaluate the technical architecture and roadmap.
The outcome is a gap analysis of your current care capabilities and a set of recommendations on how to close any gaps. But a good assessment goes beyond a simple analysis of where your organization’s care differs from industry standards. It includes a weighted analysis of which changes would deliver the greatest return on investment (ROI) within a given timeframe. The result is a mapping diagram (see the Effective Development Map graphic) that, by quadrant, depicts optimal versus sub-optimal levels of return relative to complexity, importance and executive priority. The map is a visual representation of the prioritized recommendations.
Implementing the recommendations that result from a contact center assessment can deliver significant savings and improve the customer experience. One communications company saw a 6 percent improvement in customer satisfaction in one quarter, and a 34 percent jump in sales conversion rates after implementing recommendations based on an assessment. A travel company reduced contacts per sale by 44 percent, increased sales by 58 percent, and saved $1.4 million by improving processes and policies as a result of implementing recommendations from a contact center assessment.
Assessing your contact center should both decrease your cost of care and improve the customer experience. If we measure what matters and treat customers accordingly, we can drive enterprise performance through growing and retaining revenues. Two customer-focused tools that are often recommended for next steps from an initial assessment are call quality calibration and root cause analysis of customer interactions.
Taking a Customer-Centric View of Service Delivery
As noted, performing well on quality assurance metrics does not guarantee that your customers are satisfied with the service they receive. Traditional measures of agent performance fail to evaluate skills and behaviors that are important to customers. Operations managers often define quality differently than customers do. While customers tend to focus on agent skill and personal style (e.g., Do they provide accurate information?), many quality forms focus heavily on adherence to policy and procedures.
Statistical Calibration
By statistically calibrating your quality scores with your customer satisfaction scores, you ensure that customer expectations are predominant in the quality model. This enables a customer-centric view of service delivery in which attributes that matter to customers — and affect their satisfaction — are the focus, rather than simple adherence to quality measurement.
In this technique, an evaluation team reassesses all items put in place to measure and control quality — including forms, policies, standards and procedures. The team conducts qualitative interviews with floor managers and agents and conducts a customer satisfaction survey among a statistically significant number of customers. Once that information is collected, the evaluation team performs a comparative analysis of quality performance versus satisfaction performance, paired with industry benchmarking. The result of this calibration is a readout on your quality form, showing how to better use the quality conformance process to create a better customer experience.
Through these efforts, the evaluation team can create guidelines for improved agent coaching, with an emphasis on issues that are important to customers. In addition, they can identify and halt actions viewed as negative by customers. As a result, the gap between quality measures and customer satisfaction scores is minimized. In turn, this enhances the customer’s contact experience and elevates their satisfaction.
Getting to the Root Cause of Customer Contacts in Your Call Center
Root-cause analysis reveals the underlying factors behind customer interactions. The goal is to deliver proactive care by getting to the root of customer contacts and fixing whatever prompted the customer to initiate contact in the first place.
In this step, the evaluation team collects customer interaction data and aggregates it with enterprise data to analyze the effects of the overall business model on the customer contact channels. The purpose of this exercise is to identify and quantify opportunities to improve upstream business processes. The team sends its findings to business unit heads and functional managers, leveraging their insights to effect a business transformation.
New tools that facilitate the team’s root cause analysis include:
- Web-based Customer Disposition and Categorization tool — captures data most critical for business process analysis
- Business Enterprise Data Collection tool — enables the evaluation team to capture data from upstream processes
- Process-Driving Data Repository — provides an updated snapshot of business performance, facilitating recommendations for business transformation.
As a result of the root cause analysis, the evaluation team delivers a solution roadmap to the contact center operations manager. That plan quantifies the expected results from the business transformation. By developing business intelligence around how our processes affect our customers, we have seen our partners gain tremendous return on their investment in root cause analysis. One client was able to identify more than $12 million in savings opportunities and recognized a return of $2 million as a result of initial process improvements. In another engagement, we have seen first-year savings of $8 million generated via implementing the recommendations from deploying business intelligence to analyze the root causes of contact center volume. But the short-term savings generated via gains in process efficiency are only the first of many benefits. By fixing enterprise processes, a company can create a stronger and simplified customer experience, generate fewer customer contacts and create loyal, satisfied customers who drive business growth.
Results Achieved in Critical Areas
Since the contact center often is the main interaction point between a business and its customers, it serves as the nexus of relationship management for your most vital constituency. As such, every customer transaction should translate into actionable business improvement recommendations. It is important for contact centers to have the right processes and tools in order to effectively analyze and utilize the vast amounts of data inherent in the contact center. Proper use and understanding of what data is important and how to act on that data will ultimately make it easier for your customers to do business, and deliver positive experiences that boost retention and loyalty. To achieve these goals, companies must embrace a broader strategic approach that makes relationship management the core driver of the business. Companies that do so can manage and continuously improve the customer experience, elevating service to a formidable competitive asset.
