Measuring customer satisfaction

This assessment came from Greg Levin of the International Customer Management Institute more than two years ago, and it's alarming how many call centres and contact centres still don't know how to effectively measure and improve satisfaction - especially in an economy where customer approval is beyond paramount.

For contact centres, customer satisfaction is one of the most critical factors to gaining a competitive advantage and keeping it.

The ability to measure customer satisfaction reliably throughout a contact centre and to identify satisfaction drivers that need attention is key benefits and fundamental requirements at the same time. It's what separates centres that prosper from those that don't.

* On average, 96% of customers who've had a bad service experience don't report it, and 91% of those unhappy customers don't come back.
* Dissatisfied customers will also tell 10 other people - prospective customers - of their bad experience.
* It costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one, and is 10 times more difficult.
* A 10% increase in customer retention typically increases profit by 30%, while a 5% increase can increase profit by 25% to 125%.
* The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70%; the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%-20%.
(Sources: Marketing Metrics, Bain & Co, Gartner)

So, if customer satisfaction is vital; if knowing how to reliably measure it is essential, and if being able to constantly improve it is imperative, how does a contact centre unravel the mystery of making satisfaction measurement a successful initiative? One answer is the post-call survey.

The best way to understand a customer's relationship with a company is to ask the customer directly - in a survey. It is important to ask these questions sooner rather than later, with respect to the timing of the interaction - a post-call survey. And, to make the survey even more powerful, survey data should be incorporated with operational data from the contact centre.

Customer satisfaction is one of the most critical factors to gaining a competitive advantage and keeping it.

Dave Paulding is regional sales manager for UK and Africa, Interactive Intelligence

Advances in contact centre technology have increased available post-call survey tools to capture customer feedback and gain insight into customer perceptions. However, technology alone does not assure effective post-call surveys. The makeup and delivery of post-call satisfaction surveys themselves can significantly influence the reliability (and usability) of survey data.

Only by using the right technology in combination with survey best practices will contact centres be able to gain actionable information from the post-call customer satisfaction surveys they conduct.

1. Use scientific questionnaire design. “Did you find the agent knowledgeable and experienced?” This type of question addresses two issues at once, but fails to capture meaningful information for either agent qualification. Make sure each question equates to one issue.

2. Define the goal. Set objectives up-front and don't deviate. If the goal is to collect feedback regarding an agent's knowledge level, don't let marketing add a question about a new giveaway promotion.

3. Keep IVR surveys short. The goal of a survey is to collect actionable information. While there are no established rules for timeframes, post-call surveys of two to three minutes have proven to collect enough information to be useful and still hold the respondent's interest.

4. Measure what matters. Stick to real cause-and-effect analytics.

5. Use the right scale. For most consumer surveys, a 10-point scale is standard. For IVR-based automated surveys, however, ACSI recommends a nine-point scale that utilises the phone numbers one through nine to shield respondents from “slow-finger” coding errors, ie, typing one and zero fast enough for IVR system capture. With ACSI, nine-point scales are converted to 10-point and final scores converted to a 100-point scale for reporting and “rightmarking”.

6. Don't strive for a benchmark - find the “rightmark”. Integrate operational targets and satisfaction data to find the point where service and delivery converge for your customer base.

7. Co-ordinate with IT. IT teams need advance warning for any survey initiative... and you'll need their buy-in.

8. Don't use survey results to evaluate individuals. Instead, use results to coach agents whose survey feedback scores are low, and to tailor a training regimen for ongoing improvement.

9. Report often and make results accessible. Survey results should be made available to users upon a survey's completion, whether via the IVR/survey solution or using dashboards, “heads-up” displays and other types of real-time (or near-time) alerts.

10. If you've invested, make it work. Don't lose sight of the fact that understanding customer satisfaction improves contact centre performance, customer loyalty and overall revenue. You've spent the time and money to collect the data, now put it to work.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.