THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Cindy van Wyk
Business Unit Executive, Interactive Division: Atio Corporation

 Rating customer service

The impact of the global economic crisis on businesses means that regardless of the organisation or the industry sector, money is tight. At every level, both businesses and consumers are looking to conserve what cash they have.

The easiest way for organisations to conserve their cash is to focus on customer retention strategies. In these trying times, customer acquisition is not a major focus for companies, since it costs three times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an existing one.

By and large, any company that sells a service or a product has some kind of a customer care centre, and it is in how this centre deals with a customer that determines whether they are retained or lost. After all, the majority of people who call a contact centre do so because they have a problem that needs resolving.

If you cannot satisfactorily solve their issue, the likelihood is that they will churn to a service provider who can help them. So the real question organisations should be asking themselves is: What is being done to retain existing customers?

This is no throwaway question – there is a serious disconnect between how providers perceive their service levels and how their customer base views it. A recent US-based survey conducted across some 300 organisations in a variety of verticals and horizontals indicates just how wide the disconnect is. Of the organisations surveyed, around 80% believed they were offering a good service to customers, whereas when their customers were surveyed, and asked whether they were getting good service, only 6% said yes…

Clearly, there is a massive distortion between what the service providers think they’re providing and what the customer perceptions of the same are. Organisations seriously need to focus on modifying and adapting their customer retention strategies to overcome this disparity in perceptions.

Rating customer service

One of the key ways of retaining customers in a contact centre environment is by genuinely hearing the voice of the customer or caller. In other words, one needs to rate the customer’s experience and take immediate steps to rectify any problems they may still have. Speaking from a technology-agnostic point of view, there are a number of converged technologies available today that can provide a contact centre manager with a customer satisfaction index rating. There are two ways that such a customer satisfaction index can be implemented. The first is when the agent asks the customer if they mind participating in a survey, before transferring them to the interactive voice response (IVR) application that then questions the client.

The chief problem with this method is that agent bias can have an impact. After all, if a customer is particularly difficult, it is unlikely the agent will even offer them the option of taking the survey.

This means you lose a valuable perception reflection, because of the emotive bias that comes into play. Also, it is usually just this type of customer that requires management intervention if they are to be retained. Another problem with this method is that quite often, the way the business rules are structured means that management only picks up on the issue a day or two later – by which time the client is already lost.

The second method utilises preprogramming to select customers to question. This occurs even before the call actually enters the contact centre, meaning that the agent has no idea which customers are being sampled.

The upfront benefit here is that it removes the element of bias from the equation, giving management a real-time perception reflection and an immediate understanding of the issues a customer has. The advantage is that it gives management the ability to manage the customer situation and trap a negative perception much more quickly.

Getting it right

Of course, just listening to the voice of the customer is no good, regardless of which method of customer satisfaction measurement you take. You have to act on the information received, and do so timeously. To retain the customer, proactive steps need to be taken solve their complaint.

Once organisations begin to actively listen to the voice of the customer, they will inevitably see less churn on their client base. And if customer retention is definitely happening, it means the client base is happy. A happy client base, in turn, is one which you can more easily upsell and cross-sell to.

Getting customer service right means that those happy clients will become brand propagators for your business, giving your company good word of mouth. On the other hand, customers that receive bad service, or even perceived bad service can cause enormous damage to your organisation. And nobody wants to see their business being lambasted on a website like Hellopeter.com…

Building an underground sales force

The thought behind all of this is that organisations need to have the right mindset with regards to customer service. They need to decide on their service strategy, how they rate service and how their service affects their customer retention. In the end it is about building a service mindset that puts the customer first.

And remember that customers are the best people to tell you how good or how bad your service actually is, so listen to them. Once they have told you where you are going wrong, it should be a relatively simple matter to use the technology you have to make things easier for them. Put yourself in the customer’s position and ask yourself: Would I like that experience? The problem today is that too many businesses are too busy focusing on their vision and mission statements and the like. They tend to forget that it is the customer that pays their salaries.

Listening to the customer’s voice is especially easy with the converged technology platforms that contact centres have today. It makes you wonder why everyone isn’t doing it.

The best part about building a happy customer base is that you turn your customers into your underground sales force by providing them with great service. Human beings like to talk, and if they have had an exceptionally good experience, they will tell others about it, meaning you can take the step up from customer retention to customer attraction.