Intoday’s customer-centric world, it is quite imperative to fulfill the customer requests in a timely manner so that they remain satisfied with the services offered by a company. Although,it can be very difficult to maintain the utmost level of customer satisfaction, especially with a confined budget.
According to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers willpaymore for an enriched customer experience, but only 1% of customers think thatservice providers consistently fulfiltheir expectations.
Improving customer service satisfaction scoring doesn’t occur in avacuum–it requires a complete focus on how a company interacts and treat its customers. Call centres are often charged with the Customer Service Satisfaction Rating, or CSAT; in order for call centre agents to successfully meet customer demands. For this, a call centre needs to have well-established or ganisationalstructure.
In this blog post, we will take a broader look atthree major areas: customer effort, Omni-channelefficiency and agent behaviors. Improvements in these areas will definitely improve the overall experience of customers.
Reducing customer effort: Minimizing customer effort is the mainkey to higher customer satisfaction rate. In fact, there has been a clear shift in the industry to support “Customer Effort Score” over “Net Promoter Score”. Well, both of these metrics can be determined by asking the caller a single question.In case of CES, the question is “How much effort you personally have taken to handle your request”, whilein the case of NPS it is, “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or other family member?”
To be clear, the shortcoming of these two metrics is that they are totallysubjective questions, so turning them into a quantitative value does not work at all. What’s driving the interest in CES is the understanding that no one process in the contact captures the complete customer journey. So, there is no point in focusing on metrics like Average Handle Time, because the phone call was only one part of a complicated multi-channel customer journey.
Omni-channel efficiency: In this technology-driven era, every customer depends heavily on technology. According to CCIQ, 88% of companies have adopted Omni-channel to keep up with the up surging customer demand. It is quite true that allowing customers to choose their preferred channel reduces customer efforts to a certain extent, thereby increasing customer satisfaction rate. A recent report conducted by Ovum has stated that 74% of customers use 3 channels or more to get the solution for their issues.Unfortunately, many companies don’t always prefer an Omni-channel view when looking at customer journey, or assessing the Customer Effort Score. The same report from also revealed that 58% of companies don’t measure their customers’ journey on cross-channels.
While adopting Omni-channelstrategy, it is critical that each channel performs to its own strengths, but always ensures thatthey play well together. With this approach, most of the call centre companies might feel that all new channels diminish the importance of classic voice channels. However, it isnot true,the data from Forrester’s report shows that “Voice is still the most preferred channel” with a 73% utilisation rate. Well, the problem is that customers or clients often don’t make it easy to talk to an agent.In some cases, that results intolow customer satisfaction rate and decreasing customer loyalty.
Call centre agent behavior: Customer care agents are the front line of any trust-worthy international call centre operation. So, small changes in their training and attitude can have a major impact on customer satisfaction rate. From a report published by Frost and Sulliva, it has been found that 60% of all repeat calls occur due to inappropriate behavior of call centre agents on phone. Their conversation represents the lack of training. A common mistake made by many companies is to manage the workforce by looking on the metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT) and calls per day.All these metrics sound great to measure efficiency, but they are not appropriate for measuring effectiveness of each agent. Therefore, embracing different metrics, can dramatically change agent attitude, thereby producing higher customer satisfaction rate.
These are some important ways that companies should take care in order to improve customer satisfaction rate. Many corporate call centre’s that offer telemarketing, order taking, market research and reliable lead generation call centre services also provide best customer services that enhance customer satisfaction.