customer satisfaction
Do you think it’s a good idea to transfer upset customers from the survey to supervisors?
“Do you think it’s a good idea to transfer upset customers from the survey to supervisors?” is a question that was included in the 25 Mistakes to Avoid with Post-call IVR Surveys eBook and self-assessment. The eBook and self-assessment includes diagnostic questions for you to uncover weaknesses in your post-call IVR survey program or implement a new program that is not loaded with mistakes that others have made. Now is the time to take advantage of the compilation of problems I have come across in the 20 years since inventing post-call IVR surveying in contact centers.
Why is this a problem?
I know what you’re thinking; who wouldn’t prefer to have their issue dealt with right away compared to when somebody ‘gets around to’ returning their call, right? In this world of instant information, that would tend to be the common choice, however, let’s think about the big picture and ramifications of executing that from a human and business perspective. Continue reading “Do you think it’s a good idea to transfer upset customers from the survey to supervisors?” »
Why only angry people participate in post-call IVR surveys
“Do you think only angry people participate in post-call IVR surveys?” is one of the 26 questions included in the ebook 25 Mistakes to Avoid with Post-call IVR Surveys (there is a bonus question included). The e-book and self-assessment includes diagnostic questions, like this one, to uncover many of the common mistakes people make in their post-call IVR survey programs. I never thought that after inventing post-call IVR surveys I would have to spend so much effort to overcome the misinformation that abounds about them. Please share the ebook with your colleagues so they can learn from the mistakes of others.
Why thinking this a problem?
If you think only angry people participate in post-call IVR surveys you would be terribly mistaken. And if you had a post-call IVR survey program where this happened, it is direct evidence of a massive program design flaw. It was unintentionally built to capture only the angry. Continue reading “Why only angry people participate in post-call IVR surveys” »
The customer expectation will damage your brand.
Recently two highly-publicized customer expectations lawsuits have been in the news; one for Anheuser-Busch misrepresenting the alcohol content in a variety of its beers and the other with Subway’s foot-long sandwiches for coming up short. In both cases the customer expectations were clearly set and advertised (Subway’s $5 foot-long sandwich deal and Anheuser-Busch light beers with the alcohol content of higher calorie brands). In both cases, expectations were so blatantly under-served that customer dissatisfaction went through the roof, the customer experience went in the toilet, and now both brands are dealing with multimillion dollar lawsuits and a serious image problem.
Continue reading “The customer expectation will damage your brand.” »
Are your customer processes built on good intentions but fail operationally?
I bet your parents are like mine and love to share their call center experiences because they feel close to you when they deal in your world. It turns out that my mother has been dealing with a banking issue for some time now and has been assigned an agent to call directly. At first she thought she was fortunate to have a direct contact in a sea of 1-800 numbers and endless mazes of automated services but as she’s telling me about this, it’s clear that it’s anything but great.
We all can see that the bank is trying to provide a better customer experience by building a one-on-one relationship but my mother cannot understand why she’s in a silo where no one else in the bank can offer much assistance. Her agent is currently on vacation and no one else in the bank can help because her customer record hasn’t been updated with progress notes. She is unable to resolve the banking issue with another agent and is not happy with the idea of waiting until her agent returns. We can see how the bank is in desperate need of several process improvements but we are not “normal” customers. In their effort to satisfy, they have actually caused much dissatisfaction for everyone who falls into this coverage gap. Continue reading “Are your customer processes built on good intentions but fail operationally?” »
Web Experience Survey Mistake #1 – Trying to Measure WAY too much!
My bank sent me a survey invitation after I logged into my account to review my mortgage. I was happy to click on the survey link to discuss my satisfaction with the online experience. After about 6 minutes of clicking through the pages of questions, I had to give up. Time to respond to the survey would take longer than the time I spent on the website.
Given my occupation and obsessive desire to measure customer experiences, I probably stuck with this survey longer than many other customers. Do not try to get all of your customer experience intelligence all at once from one customer experience survey. This is difficult to remember when everyone in the organization has a need for customer intelligence. Continue reading “Web Experience Survey Mistake #1 – Trying to Measure WAY too much!” »
Customer Relationship Metrics’ Most Comical Contact Center Stories
Sometimes it’s good to take a break from the serious, so let’s look back at some of our funniest stories. Wild, 10+ hour customer experience calls, dissatisfied customers completely destroying brick-and-mortar stores, customer service terrorists going on multi-social channel rants — these are just some of our most shockingly true and amusing stories, and we hope you agree. They just have to make you laugh (what else can you do). Do you have a customer experience story or an outlandish customer comment that is laugh-out-loud ridiculous like those below? Tweet us @crmetrics and tell us all about it!
- Man destroys T-Mobile store with fire extinguisher - In Manchester, England a T-Mobile customer learned he would not get a refund. He chose not to take his case to social media, instead he destroyed the store and used a fire extinguisher to spray the place. Continue reading “Customer Relationship Metrics’ Most Comical Contact Center Stories” »
The Best of Knuggets and Knuckleheads: Post-call IVR Surveys
You know that capturing post-call customer feedback is critical to your business. It allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of the customer, uncover problem products, agent issues, service faults and organizational barriers. Additionally, it reveals the positive in what is working, who is performing at high levels and quantifies how the customer experience translates into customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you are not getting these things, you are missing it. You may think that your customers are inconvenienced by being asked to participate in a post-call IVR survey. If done correctly, they will not be.
As you know, Customer Relationship Metrics conducts free Customer Insights to Action assessments on post-call IVR survey programs. Many of those who take advantage of this service do so because their current customer experience measurement program is not yielding information that can be used for driving process improvements inside the contact center and for the enterprise. Continue reading “The Best of Knuggets and Knuckleheads: Post-call IVR Surveys” »
Real-time IVR Post-call Survey Alerts are a MUST
Real-time post call IVR survey alerts are a must, because where within your customer experience engineering plans do you meet head-on the failed service experiences? Is it only after multiple complaints? Is it only after your company president shows up in the contact center? Is it after you are on the 5:00 news? Do you ignore the ones that are not loud? Do you make an attempt to gain back loyalty points that were lost during a failed call experience?
Callers make judgments about your entire organization based on their interaction with your contact center agents. Why is it so important to focus on the recovery of customers who had a dissatisfying service experience? Although the caller may not have been satisfied with the service experience in general, satisfaction with the service recovery experience is significantly related to their intention to repurchase (Boshoff, 1999). Continue reading “Real-time IVR Post-call Survey Alerts are a MUST” »
The research proves it…we cannot wait to measure the customer experience.
A 2002 Harvard Business Review article stated that after a year, customers who were surveyed regarding satisfaction with a service interaction (with a financial institution) were more than three times as likely to open a NEW account, less than half as likely to defect and were more profitable than consumers who had not been surveyed (Dholakia & Morwitz, 2002). The only difference between the two groups was that one was surveyed and one was not; neither group received any direct marketing from the company during the year. The impact of surveying customers was shown to be profound due to the customers’ desire to be acknowledged by the company; the company also remains top-of-mind when product choices are made, simply because the process of asking a consumer’s opinion allows people the opportunity to think about your products and services that otherwise may not occur (Dholakia & Morwitz, 2002). Continue reading “The research proves it…we cannot wait to measure the customer experience.” »
Emotional decisions will cost you thousands without Customer Experience Analytics
It is human nature to make emotional decisions based on nothing more than a reaction to a feeling, even if it is irrational. In business, emotional decisions made every day without thorough customer experience analysis to support them is costing you tens of thousands of wasted dollars. How do you know you are making emotional decisions? If someone had directed you to make a change or has imposed a goal and a customer experience analyst has not verified the accuracy of such, it’s a clue that it’s an emotional decision. Continue reading “Emotional decisions will cost you thousands without Customer Experience Analytics” »
Are you earning that high post-call survey score?
I have recently overheard discussions around creative ways to improve a company’s customer satisfaction ratings from their External Quality Monitoring program using a post-call survey methodology. “How can we break that 95%+ glass ceiling in customer satisfaction ratings?” “Why couldn’t the agent ask the customer at the end of each call if they have done enough for them to give them a top box rating?” Sure, it sounds straightforward. In theory, the agent would know before they hung up if they had provided the level of customer service and answered the questions that the customer wanted them to or if they needed to do more before ending the call. They could fix the problem right then and there, right? If only it were that simple. While this concept sounds like an uncomplicated fix – ask and you shall receive – it may be anything but. “Be careful what you wish for” might be more applicable to this scenario than anyone realizes. Continue reading “Are you earning that high post-call survey score?” »
How much does office culture affect customer satisfaction?
Culture. A popular buzz word across corporate America; but what does it mean and why is it so important? Hofstede, Namenwirth and Weber defined culture as “A system of values and norms that are shared among a group of people and that when taken together constitute a design for living.” Based on their definition, in order to be successful, you need to start with the core foundation of the enterprise – the office culture.
Take a minute and think back to a time (whether at work or in your personal life) when you walked into a room and could immediately feel the tension in the air. Now think of a different scenario when you walked into a room of people who were smiling, interacting with one another, possibly even laughing. Which room would you rather be in? Continue reading “How much does office culture affect customer satisfaction?” »
What stands in YOUR way from becoming customer centric?
Top companies are those that revolve their business models around their customers. Those that not only consider their customers in the design and marketing of their products, but involve them throughout their products’ development and introduction into the marketplace are the companies that lead their competitors.
But you know that talking about being customer centric and being customer centric are two different things. Changing your corporate culture can be a daunting and complicated process. Some of the top barriers to becoming a successful customer-centric organization include getting buy-in at all levels, linking your metrics to KPIs and ROI, and creating a customer-centric culture from the inside out. Again, haven’t we been talking about this for two decades? Continue reading “What stands in YOUR way from becoming customer centric?” »
All you have to do is listen to your customers.
Voice of the Customer; a catch phrase commonly uttered in offices around the globe. But what does it mean exactly? Where does it come from? How does a business decipher constructive (and valuable) feedback from noise? It is not uncommon to hear a manager say that you need to listen to the voice of the customer (VOC), but often that’s where the initiative stops. Proclaiming the need to listen and actually listening are two very different things. So is acting on the information heard.
One of our clients focused on turning such a proclamation into action and made some changes to the internal processes causing customer dissatisfaction. The External Quality Monitoring program using a post-call survey methodology revealed that only 51.6% of their callers stated that their question or problem had been resolved on the first call. With barely more than one out of every two calls yielding a resolution, FCR was obviously an extremely costly issue for them because repeat calls have direct and indirect costs. It was definitely time to take action.
Customer experience analytics clarified a common theme from the callers who reported that their issue had not been resolved on the call. Callers frequently stated that they had to call back to check on the status of the application because the agent they had spoken with did not have a way to check. “Wait and see and call back” is not a good answer for these callers. How can this information about an issue that increases the customer effort be alleviated within the internal process(es)? After taking a hard look at the outcome of this internal process from the customers’ perspective, a strategy was developed to dedicate a specific team of representatives to support the call center agents behind the scenes. Frontline agents could not have access to the needed information but this support team had the resources to review a caller’s application, claim and status. The agent can now provide the information needed to the caller upon request and eliminate the need for many customer repeat calls. Continue reading “All you have to do is listen to your customers.” »
Excellent customer service wins brand advocacy.
Anyone that’s successful in business can tell you that what sets them apart from their competition is excellent customer service. We all know this but the challenge is execution. I recently made a purchase from what I thought was a small, local business only to find out they are the biggest distributor in my state. I thought they were small because someone always answered the phone when I called and my orders were filled and delivered next day. I had no idea how big the company is because I always feel like I was their only customer. Guess what? There are hundreds of stores with similar products, but I will continue to purchase from and be a brand advocate for this particular company because of their stellar customer service.
Part of this company’s success comes from listening to the voice of their customers (VOC). Customers across all industries want value and knowledgeable, caring sales people, and companies that stand behind and service the products they sell. The companies that fall by the wayside are those that talk about listening to their customers rather than acting on the information.
My clients know their customers better than the competition knows their customers. The analysis is applied, the effect measured, re-evaluated and so on. They are driven to delicately balance what their customers want with the company’s profitability. They work to tailor their messaging and products to specific customer needs so they lead in overall customer satisfaction and brand recognition. You have seen it – those that fail to listen to the voice of the customer are quickly forgotten. Continue reading “Excellent customer service wins brand advocacy.” »
