Customer Feedback is There for the Asking
1 Sep, 2006
By: Dr. Jon AntonCan I tell what you’re thinking about my performance? No, of course, I can’t. I’m no more a mind reader than you are. If I really want to know, I should ask you for feedback. Why, then, have we found that nearly 4 out of 10 contact centers aren’t asking their customers for feedback on their contact-handling experience? Ah, now the answer to that I do know.
The statistics from our research are quite amazing. Consider that 30 percent of companies don’t collect customer satisfaction feedback because they claim it costs too much. Fifteen percent feel they already know what their callers think (hmmm, it seems there are plenty of mind readers out there after all!), and eight percent don’t think the answers are worth the time and effort. The remainder has collected feedback sometime in the past but simply weren’t doing so at the time of our research.
Most would agree that customer satisfaction is the key to success in developing and managing any business. Getting customers to tell us what’s good about the contact center service – as well as what’s bad and indifferent – can help a company not just meet, but surpass their expectations.
Researchers found that 61 percent of contact centers agree and collect feedback from callers. Most carry out research on a regular basis. More than a third admits to checking customer views daily, 12 percent opted for weekly and 20 percent prefer monthly surveys.
Almost a quarter of all feedback is received in real-time. In other words, there’s virtually no delay between the customer completing the survey and the information being back in the hands of the company for analysis and action. Overall, nearly 60 percent is processed and ready for interpretation within a week.
The majority of contact centers keep the whole feedback process in-house, preferring to carry out their own surveys (58 percent). However, that still leaves a significant number (42 percent) that choose to outsource the collection of customer opinions. Their faith in trusting a third party seems amply repaid, as well, with three-quarters being either “very satisfied” (24 percent) or “satisfied” (51 percent) with the quality of the outsourcing service they receive.
As to how organizations actually canvas customers, our research shows there are four main methods. The largest of these is live agents making outbound calls, which account for 35 percent of customer feedback. This is followed by surveys using e-mail (21 percent), paper/postcard via U.S. mail delivery (18 percent), and after-call IVR (9 percent).
Clearly, if companies want to know what a customer is thinking, they should ask. Many do, and are thorough in their search for the good, the bad and the ugly.
By far the most widely used feedback request (72 percent) is … “the reasons for customer dissatisfaction.”
This leads to the next important step in getting and using customer feedback, namely “service recovery,” defined as follows:
“Service recovery is a process that attempts to retain customers whose expectations may not have been met and who consequently may be lost to the competition.”
There are some simple steps to implement a service recovery process, for instance:
1. Organize a method to “flag” calls with low satisfaction scores to review these more closely.
2. Have flagged calls routed to a dedicated service recovery team.
3. Review dissatisfied cases. Determine (and code) core causes for dissatisfaction (multiple levels).
4. Determine whether the caller’s dissatisfaction was within the agent’s control to satisfy the customer (sometimes it’s not).
5. Track action taken. For example, did the team re-contact the caller? If not, why not? If yes, what was result?
From our research into this mission-critical area of getting and acting on customer feedback, the following can be concluded:
1. Customers are the only true judge of the service we deliver (whether we ask or not).
2. Aligning performance metrics to the customers’ opinions drives the right behaviors in agents.
3. When done right, customer feedback promotes team efforts to all focus on eliminating reasons for dissatisfaction.
4. Service recovery gives us the information needed to pinpoint improvement initiatives.
5. Continuous customer feedback can easily track whether or not changes have any impact on customer satisfaction.
6. Continuous customer feedback allows for savings and/or much better use of most valuable resources in the center.
7. Measuring and tracking customer satisfaction with the contact handling process realigns contact centers with true purpose for existence!
