Measuring customer satisfaction at the agent level

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Mats Rennstam argues that to improve customer satisfaction you need to measure at the agent level.

Bright UK is demonstrating to contact centres across the UK that they can prove the value of customer service on the bottom line – and it isn’t difficult.

“We all know that the holy grail of customer management is proving that spending time and money investing in offering a better quality customer experience has a direct impact on the bottom line,” says Mats Rennstam, Managing Director at Bright UK.  “We can prove it.”

“You can gain high-level proof quickly and easily simply by measuring key metrics in parallel with customer retention and spend,” explains Mats. “This will give you some insight.  But these metrics could be open to criticism when shared with other members of your management team who may cite price reductions or product launches as the reason for increased revenues.”

“To ensure your proof is robust, you need to measure customer satisfaction at an agent level in line with your corporate strategy and KPIs, and you will see exactly what impact customer service has on customers that have been exposed to the same offers, marketing messages and processes,” continues Mats.  “Combine this with data measuring efficiency, quality, resourcing, sales and self-service, and the results can be mind blowing.”

In 2011, the contact centre industry saw a drive towards a single measure, either Net Promoter Score, or Customer Experience Score.  This provided evidence of whether your customer service was good or bad, but not why, and certainly not how to prove its impact on your bottom line.  The hole this left in contact centre intelligence has resulted in contact centres now redefining how they measure their performance and the impact on the customer journey.

“By introducing customer feedback at agent level, and using this information to improve the performance of their people, we have seen companies grow their CSAT scores by an average 30%, which in turn has a direct impact on revenues,” says Mats. “By breaking this figure down by agent, and quantifying the effect on strategy, it really is possible to prove the value of customer service.”

Shop Direct has deployed advisor-level customer feedback.  The customer is contacted within 10 seconds of an interaction with the contact centre, and the advisor sees the results immediately.

Hilary Bennett, Head of Site at Shop Direct: “We are getting customer comments converted to text verbatim and analysing them in real time.  At the end of the survey, customers are invited to comment generally and this throws up insight into elements of the processes that need improvement, which may be contact-centre related or related to other areas of the business.  These comments are tagged and stored to provide evidence for wider business change.”

“The project drove a change in advisor behaviour immediately and achieved an ROI within 3 months,” explains Hilary.  “We saw our advisors trying to get into the high marks because it is a personal achievement – it’s the customer that is marketing them!  For the customer, it improved the service.  Advisors began to focus on the customer experience and continued to deliver excellence right to the end of their shift.”

Shop Direct know that any improvement on CSI scores in a business their size is a massive achievement.  But they expect to see customer retention and customer loyalty increase as a direct result of this project.  This has contributed to an increase in online sales by 20%.

“Because most customers only contact these companies a few times per year, these programmes will have to run for a minimum of 12 months to get enough data, as well as to rule out any external macro-factors beyond the contact centre’s control and therefore skewing the results,” concludes Mats.  “Thanks to being able to separate scores between internal performance factors and external factors, the ambiguity around what is driving the results decreases significantly.”

Author: Jo Robinson

Published On: 13th Mar 2013 - Last modified: 18th Sep 2019
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