Six steps to successful monitoring of your customer service – www.mycustomer.com
In today’s competitive environment, the quality of your customer service is an increasingly important factor in nurturing positive customer loyalty. However, it remains the case that many organisations are still not monitoring, measuring or even managing the service quality of their contact centre agents, despite the fact that a single interaction between them and the customer can make or break a relationship.
Verint recently carried out some research looking at the state of customer service in the UK. It found that despite the current economic climate, only 22% of consumers value price over service and as many as 38% of consumers admit to never contacting their suppliers, and those that do don’t get in touch very often. How can you build customer relationships and create a loyal customer base if this is the case?
Organisations need to ensure that the few interactions a customer has with the contact centre are handled efficiently and leave the customer feeling satisfied.
While the customer’s personal experience cannot always be completely captured and analysed, this information – call recordings in contact centres, customer emails and social media interactions – combined with customer satisfaction surveys, can give an organisation a better idea of the customer experience. These insights will allow companies to improve their service and tailor their products precisely to what their customers want, improving satisfaction and increasing loyalty.
Unfortunately, the reality for many organisations is slightly different, and organisations often struggle to manage the basic call monitoring functions, or capture additional insight from other channels such as email, instant messaging or social networking sites. Too often the focus is put on streamlining internal efficiency-based metrics, meeting tightly monitored call routing and time SLAs, while the detailed assessment of the customer experience and the outcome of the call are put to one side.
By treating calls as one-off customer issues, the contact centre is at risk of ignoring the underlying commonalties and actually being able to identify the root-cause and possible prevention for these situations. Fundamentally, though, this can all act towards improving the customer service.
The key to effective quality monitoring includes six crucial steps:
Listen to your customers by monitoring interactions. Ask questions such as: are these interactions related to the company’s goals and objectives, or are they related to specific areas of concern such as customer attrition? This is where analytics comes into play for the contact centre. Speech analytics identifies calls that are relevant for evaluation and text analytics identifies email and chat interactions that should be monitored.
Capture all of your customer feedback channels. Apply the same quality standard that is used for calls to text-based interactions like email and chat.
Ask your customer what they think. Instead of using your organisation’s internal metrics to measure the quality of a call, ask the customer: “What did you think of your experience and the agent you worked with?” or “Did your service experience match the promise made in our advertising?” It’s very important to map high-quality interactions with your customers’ expectations, comparing internal evaluation scores with customer scores.
Use quality monitoring to help agents improve skills. Evaluate interactions to identify skills gaps, and provide individual learning opportunities where there are deficiencies.
Do not view agent development as a one-off activity. Provide continuous coaching that will help improve agent performance and productivity. Coaching is key to consistent customer service.
Measure your results and keep track of continuous feedback and evaluation to monitor and measure progress.
By monitoring quality across multiple channels, organisations can learn from their customer interactions, leading to better decision making, service and processes. The monitoring, measuring and managing of performance and service quality must remain a priority, but the “voice of the customer” analytics, across multiple channels, is just as important.
By adopting the view that quality monitoring is a strategic process rather than a tactical one, companies will begin to see an improvement of their customers experience and their customers therefore becoming their strongest champions.
Steve Rosier is director of voice of the customer analytics at Verint.
Thanks for these tips!!
I must say, don’t neglect small things while monitoring your calls. Make sure to identify calls that fail to provide acceptable customer satisfaction and determine the reasons. And as per my view, you should offer customers several ways to contact you. For more tips on improving call quality monitoring, refer to this blog http://www.callcenterhosting.in/blog/the-5-steps-to-improve-your-call-qu…
hi,
Thanks for the tips, but i have 5 Ways to Deliver Awesome Customer Care Service,
1.Respect and appreciate your customers
2.Treat your team members right
3.Respond immediately
4.Be knowledgeable
5.Accept feedback or reviews and take action accordingly
Call center outsourcing is the most typical service that businesses seek, especially those who deals with customers on a regular basis. While call center agencies provide these services, they are a business like any other. Taking good care of customers would present to be beneficial to both the call center agency and their clients. In doing so, call centers must be able to carry the responsibility to provide to the needs of their very own team members by arranging bonuses for motivation. Overall, businesses seek customer care services from call centers in hopes for attaining not only cost efficiency but high customer care. It is indeed the call center agencies’ engagement to provide the highest customer care service they could provide.
Visit : https://www.31west.net
Thanks for this tips. I want to try to implement them.
Still new here. But this is a great piece and covers a lot of things we employers let fall through the cracks.
Great tips. Thanks. I’ve read many books but you collect everything in one post.
Great tips. It would also make a great difference if you did all this through a CRM or a support helpdesk tool like Zendesk or Freshdesk.
That’s brilliant article! I’m so pleased to get these steps. Sometimes I get angry customers then I feel like what should I do. It’s a great guide to those who are dealing with lack of customer satisfaction.
Many business people seem to be afraid of using social media, afraid of the power of a compaint about their business going viral, afraid of not being in control over what is said. However, even if a complaint is made about your business, you are much better off knowing about it. Not only will you find out where the ‘cracks’ in your business are and you can then do something about them but you can respond. An angry customer who receives an apology or an assurance that their complaint will be resolved or investigated will calm down quite quickly.
Quality monitoring is extremely important. Whether you have an in-house team of customer service reps or you have outsourced it, there is a need for quality checks at every point. We live in a competitive world where a competitor is waiting around the corner to steal your customers. The best ways to retain them is ensuring quality service and quality customer care. This is the current scenario in the travel & tourism industry.
Thanks for sharing, great tips.
Great tips, I strongly agree with your approach and believe its a hand on a directive which should be done from the bottom up. I run a website called http://surveyfeedbacklist.com and feature how top stores are enhancing customer experience with surveys. There are numerous benefits, not only to the consumer (free gifts, coupons etc) but to the business by gaining a valuable insight to it’s customers thoughts and feelings! Looking forward to reading more of your work.
Sentiment from reviews and social media are also ideal to monitor
Thank you, Steve, for sharing these amazing tips. Customer feedback can help you in improving your customer services. So, it is very important to ask questions in detailed manner and to interact with customers politely to get all your answers. Most of the customers get annoyed when they receive calls from their service providers. In order to get your answers to improve customer experience, customer interaction should be good.
Regards,
Neha Gupta
Call Center Services
I totally agree with this article but the thing that you should keep in mind is your SLA.
This minute thing is the key to your reputation if you attend you customer in short time and not them wait then this will help in building your geed reputation in the market.
But that is not possible to meet if you have an in-house team and your operations become larger so you can outsource this process this will save you a lot of money and all the managing headaches will be of the agency whom you outsource to.
For more information, you can visit on your website.
When you say “By monitoring quality across multiple channels” – what channels exactly do you mean?
Hi, it’s referring to service channels – so depending on what channels are utilised by an org, this could be anything from live agents, to chatbots, to self-service, to the multitude of social platforms.
Thanks for informative tips. Is there any useful tool to implement this which will help to maintain the data?
Thanks for the great post
A great piece. I will apply the strategies as I seek to attract and retain more customers to my business.
Today, customer service is key in every single business in the market. Without quality customer service, a company’s business might not even see rapid progress despite being in the market for so long. This is especially essential for companies that sell products or services that are considered as one-off and they need to ensure that the customers return.
I reckon that you should always ask for feedback from your customers, or get them to review your services and products. It’s the only way that you’ll be able to understand how they perceive your business and the things that you’re offering to them!
Thanks for the informative tips.
