Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - June 2008
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It doesn’t matter how well you think your center is serving customers if the customers don’t agree. Here’s how you can get more information — and from more customers — and get more value out of it.
As global competition heats up, organizations are looking for innovative ways to improve customer satisfaction and overall company performance. Bain & Company, a global business consulting firm, asked more than 300 companies if they believed they were delivering a “superior experience” to their customers. Eighty percent of the surveyed companies said that they were.
The firm then solicited feedback from the customers themselves. Only 8 percent of those surveyed felt that they were, indeed, getting a “superior experience.” As this study shows, all too often, internal service quality perceptions can differ greatly from actual customer perceptions. Increasingly, the importance of improving the customer experience has risen to senior management, including members of the board, among global organizations.
One way to align customer experience measurements with internal metrics is to obtain direct feedback from customers in the form of customer surveys. With an automated customer feedback solution, organizations can gather data that might otherwise be overlooked or lost. Companies gain direct insight into the effectiveness of their people, products and processes, allowing them to take action quickly and address customer concerns.
Many organizations spend a great deal of time and resources generating internal “agent evaluation” scores as part of their contact center quality monitoring program or business optimization initiative. Because this data is typically created by internal managers, the information is limited and doesn’t always reflect the customer’s perception of how an agent handled phone, email and Web-based interactions.
A customer feedback solution can provide an accurate and complete view of customer experience metrics. In doing so, it should tightly integrate with back-office, contact center software and CRM systems to provide insight into customer and performance data. Automated surveys engage a customer immediately after his or her interaction with an agent and ask a series of questions to determine his or her level of satisfaction. Such dynamic surveys are delivered based on business rules defined by the company and can be administered over IVR, Web and email.
Asking “Intelligent” Questions
Historically, organizations have done a less-than-stellar job of administering surveys through their own IVR systems. As a result, survey completion rates often range from 0.2 to 1 percent. Putting what’s convenient for a company in front of its customers’ needs is a common reason for low response rates. Also, many organizations elicit a response before addressing the customer’s specific reason for calling. Not only does this lead to poor response rates, it also understandably decreases customer satisfaction with the company.
More and more, companies today are making enterprisewide efforts to shift the conventional way of looking at surveys: They are creating questions and processes designed to increase response rates and relevance. One example involves developing “intelligent” questions. Intelligent questions are context-based, timely and engage customers in order to deliver response rates far greater than those obtained through one-size-fits-all questionnaires. As a result, companies can move beyond mere sampling to capture meaningful data — even with large numbers of customers and geographically dispersed sites. Surveys built upon intelligent questions have proven to be successful, leading to completion rates of 70 percent or greater.
A customer feedback solution also should have the capability to create surveys with conditional questions using a template, a library of questions or the company’s own questions. Surveys can then be presented to customers based on defined rules, allowing them to be dynamic and relevant to the customer’s experience. A company can set rules to deliver surveys based on the specific customer or customer type, customer history, and agent, as well as queue type, transaction type or product, process or service used. There is also an option to leave a survey question open-ended to allow for free-flow commentary from the customer.
The following demonstrates an example of a dynamic survey. If the question asks, “were you happy?” a “yes” response should lead to the next appropriate question. Alternatively, a “no” response should prompt a question to help the company identify what specifically the customer was not happy with, so the issue can be resolved.
Adding Value to the Contact Center
Once data has been gathered via the survey, this customer intelligence can provide great value inside the contact center to increase first-call resolution rates, reduce escalations, enhance customer satisfaction and retention, and improve agent coaching and training. The best surveys involve the agent to help ensure that immediate opportunities are acted upon. To realize the greatest benefits, a customer feedback solution should also deliver feedback on performance and trigger learning to agents.
There are a variety of customer feedback solution tools designed to empower agents with additional information and improve performance through feedback and training. And in the end, the customer will ultimately benefit from the investment in such tools. Customer feedback functions that organizations, their contact centers and agents can take advantage of include:
· Alerts and Workflow. Contact centers need to be assured that the appropriate people are notified during a particular circumstance. For example, if there is a customer retention opportunity that requires immediate attention, an email alert targeting the appropriate person within the enterprise is triggered. Workflows, which are a predefined series of activities that must be performed within a prescribed period of time, can also be targeted for alerts by the system.
· Feedback Performance. Following agent performance improvement is a must. For any metric monitored within the system, agents and managers can determine feedback goals and track them against actual performance results.
· Lesson Management. Lesson management enables service representatives, agents and managers to access eLearning assignments based on the greatest area of need. They can access specific coursework that has been assigned, as well as information on the duration and priority of each lesson and the deadline for completion. Supervisors can view course transcripts and run reports, enabling them to assess the progress and status of training for individual employees.
· Advanced Scorecards. Managers can track role-appropriate scorecards that display employee performance metrics. These scorecards include an extensive set of predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) — or the ability to create your own — so all levels of the organization, from agents to executives, can see how they’re performing against goals.
Customer feedback surveys also function well together with an effective speech analytics solution. Acting as two bookends to a comprehensive suite, speech analytics can be a complementary tool to make surveys more effective and targeted.
Speech analytics software analyzes call content and gathers timely customer and market insights by leveraging indexing and categorization technologies with advanced emotion detection. With this added functionality, companies can automatically categorize audio interactions according to their specific themes, challenges and objectives. Then, the solution automatically identifies the top reasons for calls within each category to get to the root cause of issues. Armed with this additional information, organizations can make timely adjustments and track persistent customer service issues, trends and opportunities.
Adding Value to the Enterprise
The value of customer feedback extends far beyond the contact center, sharing findings and a wealth of information throughout the rest of the enterprise. The contact center acts as a bridge between the marketplace and the company, changing the old perception that the value of customer feedback is siloed in the contact center.
The key to obtaining useful customer feedback is getting customers to participate in the first place. By optimizing surveys to increase response rates, organizations can access a gold mine of information on what customers are really thinking. This actionable intelligence is invaluable when it comes to agent training and feedback as well providing insight to departments throughout the contact center and broader enterprise.
Companies generally look for feedback in three key areas of the business: people, processes and products.
· People. In terms of people, companies can gain intelligence on how store staff, branch office workers, services technicians, back-office personnel and contact center agents are performing.
· Processes. By evaluating process effectiveness, organizations can get valuable insight into potentially problematic issues within the company, including those attributed to different groups. For example, the contact center might bear the heat of an insurance claims complaint, but the main issue may lie in back-office data entry of accident information.
· Products. Customer feedback can also be valuable to product development groups within the company. Before new products are launched, customer surveys can gather initial feedback that can be leveraged to make adjustments. This on-the-fly focus group can also report information to the marketing team so it can adjust messaging and communications.
Linking customer feedback solutions with quality monitoring, eLearning, speech analytics and performance scorecards goes a step further than standalone solutions or solutions that are not tightly integrated. A unified solution enables organizations to go from why to how — while quickly mining the database of recorded interactions and driving targeted eLearning. Leveraging customer feedback in performance scorecards and agent evaluations adds yet another powerful dimension by aligning business measures of success with actual customer measures. Customer feedback solutions can be powerful tools in their own right. Yet, when they are used as part of a unified solution, they help drive a closed-loop system where customer feedback can be used as a strategic asset for improving service quality, enhancing workforce performance, and driving broader business and workforce optimization results.
