How do helpdesk and call centre managers measure customer satisfaction and more to the point, how do they improve it?
A 2002 study of Australasian contact centre managers commissioned by Genesys found over half had improving customer satisfaction as their primary goal for the year ahead, while a massive 84 percent felt their organisation’s revenue would be impacted if the contact centre did not meet its customer satisfaction levels.
James Brooks, managing director of Genesys Australasia, says “traditional measurement metrics such as average handle time are being replaced by customer-centric metrics such as resolution rates and a new trend to look at service exceptions rather than the average.”
Interestingly, many respondents cited anecdotal evidence supporting the theory that happier agents make for happier customers. The study found companies were using training and technology to address this issue. Multi-skilling provides more task variety, while skills-based routing, computer-telephone integration (CTI), interactive voice response (IVR), and speech recognition reduce or remove mundane tasks and improve agents’ ability to provide good service.
It’s “unequivocally true” that happier staff lead to more satisfied customers, says Archie Wilson, vice president Asia Pacific at FrontÂÂRange. The right tools help staff do a better job, and that’s also reflected in customer satisfaction, but a technological fix is not sufficient: the right systems and processes are also important, he says.
FrontRange’s own experience is that better queuing and CTI made agents’ jobs less repetitive and they spent more time on the interesting part of their work. They were happier as a result, and customer satisfaction also increased.
One of the speakers at this year’s Australian Direct Marketing Association Pan-Pacific Marketing Conference will be John McKean of the Centre for Information Based Competition. McKean will present results from a three-year study showing 70 percent of customer decision-making is based on how we are treated, and only 30 percent is to do with the product itself. He will also explore the fallacy of CRM: customers don’t want a “relationship”, they just want to buy the product and be treated as a human being in the process.
The Genesys research also showed that the use of self-service channels is increasing, with almost 50 percent using or planning to use both Web and IVR channels for customer contact, though most were using a mix of self and assisted service to lower costs and to satisfy customers’ service expectations.
Collecting information
Brian Prentice, senior research analyst, Web and collaboration strategies service at META Group, suggested that making people happy isn’t enough; organisations should look for measurable improvements in business metrics. They need to distinguish the purpose of each contact, for example an outbound call might be to promote customer awareness or to generate a transaction. Accordingly, “these metrics can be wide and varied,” he says, such as the sales made by each agent. “You can’t talk about ‘delighting customers’ any more,” he says, “the attitude is ‘we’ve got to see an ROI’.”
Tony Hollings, contact centre strategy manager at NEC Business Solutions, agrees. Business outcomes, such as the number of sales closed by an agent are more important that talk time, he says. If you watch business metrics closely enough, you can quickly spot satisfaction-related issues. But few companies do pay such close attention, so he suggests the rest should include callbacks and surveys to measure customer satisfaction directly.
Michael Jenkins, national manager for strategic sourcing at Getronics, uses traditional metrics to ensure the company complies with SLAs, but he believes customer satisfaction is more important. Even if Getronics meets its contractual requirements, users might not be happy: “it all comes down to expectation.”
The people reporting around two-thirds of all incidents are surveyed on a range of satisfaction measures. These include satisfaction with the time taken to resolve the problem, and the technical and language skills (staff at the Sydney call centre speak 19 languages) of the engineer. The average score for Getronics’ largest customer is 4.6 out of 5, says Jenkins. These scores “really are our lifeblood”.
Aligning SLAs with customers’ real expectations can be an issue, he says. Some departments in an organisation may need a two or three minute response, while others would be happy with two to three hours. “Organisations really need to be focussed on the business requirement and align the SLA with that,” he says.
Surveys conducted by IVR at the end of service calls do not take up agents’ time and give “inarguable” results, according to David Wynham, senior account manager at Lake Corporation. However, “I don’t think it’s something that’s generally done at all well,” he says.
Pramod Ratwani, vice president Asia Pacific at Concerto Software suggests that metrics such as average answer time, dropped call rates, and first agent resolution correlate with customer satisfaction, and these measures are amenable to benchmarking.
“Customer satisfaction can be such an intangible measure it is hard to truly define. What works for one company will be different to another and is very much dependent on factors such as internal process, product, staff, sales channels, and training,” says Martyn Riddle, marketing manager Asia Pacific at Rockwell FirstPoint Contact. “We take all these factors into account and then use the information to focus on tangibles that can be controlled by technology such as call routing, call abandon rate, and average speed of answer, which together form the key components of customer service levels.”
Mark Sellars, professional services manager at POINT Australia thinks many businesses fall into a measurement trap. “They concentrate on the analytics and metrics of turnaround and call duration, and end up leaving their frontline staff feeling guilty about not being able to provide what they believe is ‘better service’. Performance goals and associated remuneration can help in directing staff to the agreed business goals but technology can also provide additional options.”
But ultimately, “customer retention provides a true level of overall satisfaction,” says Ratwani.
“The person who takes the call should be able to answer the call,” says Wyndham, suggesting that companies such as Vodafone and Optus do a better job in this respect because they don’t have the baggage of a long history, while Virgin and other companies that don’t have a branch network needed to provide good service at the contact centre.
Companies can do well despite their baggage, and GE Capital Finance “really stands out”, he says. GE has successfully replaced a diverse branch network with two call centres by concentrating on processes, training, communications, and complaint handling.
“People vote with their feet,” says Hans van Pelt, general manager IT and communications at airline Regional Express, though he collects information about customer satisfaction with his call centre through comments made by passengers to flight attendants.
Dermot McCutcheon, managing director Asia Pacific at Witness Systems takes a contrary view: “You cannot run a call centre on production metrics.”
That “factory mentality” reflects an era when call centres were about cutting costs, he says, but now they account for 70 percent or more of interactions, “the differentiator is service”.
While audio recording is commonplace in call centres, Witness Systems’ software goes a step further and creates a video record of what appeared on the agent’s screen. This gives supervisors “an objective way of scoring the call” for qualitative issues such as correctly following prompts and logging information, says McCutcheon. For example, the software revealed that agents at an ISP’s help desk were fixing problems without logging the issue and its resolution in the knowledgebase, and consequently no action was being taken to reduce the occurrence of these issues.
Since it’s just not possible to listen to every recording, the Witness software allows the application of business rules to determine which recordings are retained, such as “every call that results in a sale” or “every help desk call where the priority is raised to level one”.
Commenting on a 2002 survey of Australian call centres carried out in conjunction with Witness, Martin Conboy, chief executive officer of callcentres.net, says an increased focus on achieving customer satisfaction through quality monitoring is evident across the board, with 63 percent of contact centre outsourcers, 61 percent of financial organisations, 58 percent of government and utilities, and 43 percent of IT&C companies planning to invest in monitoring systems.
Customer surveys are an important part of determining levels of satisfaction at Brisbane’s Black and White Cabs. The company listens in to some of the calls handled by IVR in order to see how customers react to it, and this information is used in conjunction with the hard numbers generated by phone surveys of customers. As Cowley admits, you can only survey customers who actually made a booking—you don’t know about the people who baulked—but over 70 percent of people given the chance to book automatically have done so, and over 99 percent of those would use the system again.
Michelle Bentley is customer relationships manager at banking software supplier FNS. High-quality support is vital in this sector, because sales cycles are very long so if you lose a customer it can be many years before you get another chance with them. Furthermore, there are some countries where if the FNS software fails, the entire banking system comes to a halt.
Bentley stays in personal contact with clients by working various shifts on the help line and by phoning her customers. Sales staff visit clients on an ongoing basis, and Bentley also conducts surveys via the Internet: “our customers are global, so it is the best way to reach them.” The information collected is aggregated and used to develop action plans.
One issue with surveys is that the response rate might not be very high, so it’s important to trigger the questionnaire frequently enough to get a statistically significant result, says Wilson.
