Nexidia

Editorial Spotlight: Learning to Listen

By: Oliver Cotton
CCF Magazine
Oct. 18, 2007

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The fact is, outstanding customer service is an elusive animal. First of all, it can be difficult to define — what does outstanding customer service consist of? Well, a good place to start is to benchmark it against your customers expectations — if you exceed these, you’re on the right track. And how do you do this? Simple…stop and listen.

But in the hectic environment that is the contact centre, it can be difficult to find time to breathe, let alone listen to each one of your customers. But this is essential, because they are telling you everything you could ever need to know about your service, your products and even your business.

So how do you go about this seemingly Herculean task? Well, don’t worry, you don’t need to start listening in to all of the calls. Just think about implementing some of the following techniques:

Feedback surveys
“You need to understand that the customer experience is impacted by three things: the interaction; the products or services; and the processes that the customer goes through — their perception of your business,” says Richard Ray, Verint’s head of business consulting EMEA. The gist is that information resulting from each of these factors will inform you, as a company, of how well you are dealing with your customers. You just need to get hold of this information, which is where customer surveys come in.

According to Ray, the secret lies in collecting feedback as part of the transaction, rather than at a later date, before there’s time for your customer’s judgement to have been affected by other experiences in the interim. “If the transaction and survey take place at the same time, then the survey is in context and specific questions can be asked about the transaction that has just taken place,” explains Ray.

“We would also encourage agents to be involved and get them to invite the customers to participate. We’ve found that when asked to complete a survey by the IVR computer, the customer response rate is about two per cent. When asked by the agent, the response rate is more like 30-80 per cent. It’s also important that questions are conditional, or dynamic, which means question two can be changed, based on what response the customer gave to question one. This also helps to keep the customer more engaged, because they are only answering questions relevant to the experience they have just had.”

According to Gary Schwartz of customer feedback specialist Confirmit, surveys always give the best indication of your customer’s opinions: “By their nature, they are comprehensive because you ask every single customer. This is not something you get from other procedures, such as mystery shopping, in which you might simply get someone who is having a bad, or a good, day. The only way you can ever really know if your customers are satisfied is if you actually ask them.”

Customer surveys also benefit from the fact that many can operate in real-time, and therefore you can act on the results immediately. “By carrying out customer surveys immediately, the quantity of response will be better — 30-70 per cent rather than the two per cent response rate of post-event surveys,” explains Adam Faulkner, director and founder of Sabio. “You can then build the results into your business immediately and it becomes a powerful way to improve performance and even reduce customer churn.”

The information must be used correctly, though, if it is to realise its true potential. “The problem,” says Colin Shaw, founder and ceo of consultancy Beyond Philosophy, “is that the data is often only seen by a few people in the higher levels of the company and isn’t introduced into training courses in the ways that it should.” There really isn’t much point in collecting this research if you don’t actively do something with the results.

Mystery shopping
Mystery shopping essentially serves to replicate real customers and report back with assessments of agent performance from a would-be customer’s point of view. According to Demitris Edwards, senior partner at mystery shopping firm Vocall, it will typically measure both soft skills — such as telephone manner, communications skills and sales technique — and hard data — such as whether the agent provided an ideal answer, any attempts at add-on sales, as well as monitoring compliance: “The advantages of mystery shopping is in its ability to benchmark a company against its competition and to see how the call centre compares to its peers,” he says.

But what of the obvious issues with mystery shopping? Firstly, with call centres taking, on average, thousands of calls per day, how representative is 40 or 50 calls? And, secondly, calling in pretending to be a customer, no matter how good the story board is, is still not the same as having real customers calling.

According to Shaw: “A mystery shopper is not necessarily going to do what a customer will. It would be more beneficial to get feedback from your actual customers. It may also be worth calling your competitors and seeing what they’re doing, but you must be honest with yourself about how you compare. Research good centres and call them, and make sure you share this best practice across the business.”

However, Edwards responds: “Mystery shopping can look at the quality from both a company’s internal point of view and that of the customer. Essentially, it can fill the gaps that are left by focus groups, existing in-house supervisor monitoring and real customer surveys. It can help to iron out problem calls before they occur, because it can be used as a tool for training and coaching staff.”

Speech analytics
This new kid on the block can really help when it comes to picking up on the finer points of your customer interactions. Contact centres have always recorded samples of telephone calls for quality monitoring reasons and for improving the training and coaching of its agents, and with recent improvements in capturing and storing these calls digitally, it’s easy to now record and store all of your inbound and outbound calls.

Listen closely enough to any customer interaction and you’ll hear your customers revealing a wealth of information, from how they view your organisation, products and services, to what they require for you to retain or grow them as customers. The problem is simply the overwhelming mass of data that is captured.

Speech analytics can overcome these difficulties by identifying groups of interactions that meet specific search criteria and may warrant further investigation. They can pick up the type and frequency of words used, heightened levels of stress and emotion during the interaction, as well as periods of silence, overlapping conversation or interruptions. All of which means you obtain reliable information on the customer interaction, direct from the customers themselves.

“The good news is that as most contact centres routinely record all their calls, they already have the answers — they just need to find them,” says Jonathan Wax, managing director of Nexidia EMEA. “Speech analytics allows organisations to rapidly understand what their customers are saying and then react accordingly. It is possible for systems to process in excess of 8,100 hours of recorded audio per day (about 121,500 four minute phone calls) and provide near real-time reporting of what’s happening in these calls.
The system can be set up to routinely identify the issues that drive and prevent high levels of customer satisfaction, such as offers of apology; people threatening to leave or an escalation request. The key is to take the recorded calls and mine them for insights that will help your business.”

Faulkner agrees: “Speech analytics is a powerful tool, but it needs to be driven around specific requirements, such as helping to stop customer churn. It can’t be used in isolation, but when used in combination with other methods, it can enable you to react quickly to problems, and head them off.”

Of course, these are not the only ways in which you can listen to your customers and some don’t require such deep pockets — far from it. “Customer complaints are a big indicator,” says Shaw. “It can be described as free market research. But it’s important to remember to deal with any complaints through people across the organisation, and not leave them down to just individuals, because otherwise no one learns anything.

“The web is another place to find out how people about your business. There are blogs and websites that rate organisations — and if you Google “Dell sucks,” for example, you get almost two million matches. There is also blogging and social media, so all companies should be researching their own profiles on the web.

“And I’d also recommend that senior managers try out their own service — be a customer and call one of your own agents. It gives you an insight into what your organisation is like.”

So, it’s not as hard as it first appears. There are practices and technologies that can transport you directly into your customers’ heads. And, once you there, you can see what it is they really want from your business. You can then worry about addressing their needs. Simple really.