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What are some ways to increase customer service satisfaction in my call center?
What are some good ways to increase customer service satisfaction in my call center? Which indicators should I be monitoring more closely in order to ensure better service? What suggestions do you have?
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6 Answers
Hi Annie, this is a wide-ranging topic. The new fad has gone from abandon rates to ASA to customer satisfaction and now to customer engagement/net promoter. None of these are the best indicators for measuring the quality of service. The best indicators are based on empirical performance that can only be measured in business growth. What is it that your business needs to achieve to be healthy? Identify that as the most important metric you wish to improve. You may think that this has little to do with customer satisfaction but it has everything to do with how you get there, as this business target must be part of your planning process.
That said, there are tactics that do produce results. Decades of worldwide surveys show that customers want the same thing regardless of the product or service. I call it the four “A’s” of service. They want acceptance (friendliness/empathy), accuracy (the first time every time) and accessibility (anytime/from anyplace/from any channel). They also have one more thing in common that is rarely given; they wish to be given trusted advice (non-judgmental and personalized). Skills in giving trusted advice is a key business differentiator and requires professional training and knowledge-based resources. These four factors need to be built into your agent expectations measured through metrics, monitoring and coaching. You should only have a few important expectations that your agents can refer to in each customer contact (the four “A’s” are a great start). Too many expectations result in confusion and disillusioned agents. This also translates into expectations for your supervisors. They can’t be chasing administrative rabbits; they must spend a significant part of their day coaching in, out or up based on these expectations. Your supervisors need to have regular calibration sessions with you to keep this process from falling into their old zones of comfort and personal bias.
One of my favorite metrics is first contact resolution. It relates to accuracy and is a huge factor of accessibility (in terms of convenience). For accessibility, I also look at ASA for the longest waits so I can adjust forecasts accordingly. Measures for acceptance are likely already part of your monitoring but keep it simple as one word can cover all those behaviors you are looking for such as active listening, personalization (using the customer’s name), empathy, showing genuine interest and so on. Providing useful education and advice can be measured in subjective terms using monitoring and coaching but the best metric is still business growth. This could be individualized as cross sales, up-sells and/or qualified referrals. Keep in mind that your employees must grow/develop for your customers to grow (deeper relationships) that, in turn, grows your business. Short calls and AHT can also indicate if agents are spending enough time with your customers to develop a trusted relationship. I hope this has been helpful although it is only a skin-deep dissertation. I use a simple business model to develop value then engagement that results in growth for employees, customers and the business. It isn’t the only way to get results but this has worked best for me.
Without knowing what your call center does it is difficult to provide specific guidance. But looking generally, what does a caller want when they dial into any company? Most want a fast, accurate response to their reason for calling that gets it taken care of in one pleasant interaction. So what to measure? First call resolution is the thing that seems to have the greatest potential impact on both customer satisfaction and efficiency, but it is hard to measure accurately. Quality gets after the accurate and pleasant characteristics. Speed of answer is only part of the speed question, since speed to resolution of the problem is also a part of the issue. First call resolution will probably take care of the rest.
You are asking about ‘better’ service. Is there something that leads you do believe that the service you already provide is sub-par? Make sure of what it is that you want to change. Once you investigate that, your response should be evident.
If you simply want to ensure good service to your customers, here is my advice. Monitor calls. Most companies dislike this solution because you have to spend headcount on people that do not directly contribute to your bottom line. However, there is no call duration metric in the world that can gauge the satisfaction of all your customers. Each customer has individual expectations. If your phone agents are prepared to meet those expectations on every call, it will show up during monitoring sessions.
Here are my suggestions for starting a monitoring program. First, do not use a script tick-mark sheet. Customers really do not care if you are using the latest tag line that the marketing department just came up with. Next, what you should be looking for is a Positive Memorable Customer Experience. You will be able to hear if it is there on each call, regardless of the kind of call it is. Finally, keep your scoring simple: 3 points for a PMCE, 2 points for ‘average, but could have been better’, and 1 point for ‘needs coaching’.
Remember, in a call center, it is all about the call.
Have you considered looking at NPS? This must be company wide and needs focus, budget allocation and attention from all levels...
As Maggie states, it is difficult to define what is considered good or bad customer service without specific knowledge of what it does. But generally speaking I've seen one of the biggest problems for poor customer service doesn't even lie in the call center itself but in the specific resolutory areas... you can be receiving thousands of calls a day and processing them effective and attentive, but if the rest of the organization is not playing their part, any effort to make a call center more customer-responsive are totally wasted. As a customer, for example, if I have a complaint for a non-recognized charge on my credit card, I don't care less if I need to be waiting five minutes in an IVR loop, and if I need to explain the issue to two or three people, AS LONG as they solve the charge IMMEDIATELY... the most frustating thing is a call center agent that tells you they cannot solve you a problem and needs to be escalated somewhere else in an organizational cloud which you have no interaction with...
As folks have already said, there are a lot of ways to do this, and to a certain extent it depends on your organization. That said, we've pulled data from hundreds of UserVoice Helpdesk accounts, and it was pretty clear to us that answering quickly (and answering /correctly/) were direct drivers of customer satisfaction. 25% of "kudos" came from replie within 15 minutes, and 46% given after a single admin response. You can see the study here: http://ar.gy/o3D
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