Compare Call Center Software

Measuring Customer Satisfaction In Your Contact Center

How important is customer satisfaction to you? It should be key to gaining a competitive advantage and keeping it. Therefore, you must be able to measure customer satisfaction and identify satisfaction drivers that need attention.

While companies are attempting to cut costs they must still keep their customers happy or risk losing them.

Did you know:

1.96% of customers who have had a bad experience dont report it and 91% of those dont do business with you again.

2.Dissatisfied customers tell 10 or more others who will never do business with you.

3.It costs 5 times as much to recruit a new customer as it costs to keep an existing customer.

4.The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, but the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.

If customer satisfaction is so important, how can you ascertain the level of your customers satisfaction. ASK THEM. Yes, ask them directly. And ask them within minutes of their call or e-mail to you. Feedback collected immediately after an interaction event is 40% more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours (or later) after the event.

Current contact center software contains post-call survey tools to capture customer feedback and enable you to gain insight into customer perceptions. These automated surveys have far lower costs and faster turnaround times than any other method.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Contact Center Part 2

Using the automated survey tool in your help center software will give you quick and accurate feedback after each interaction with your customers. Technology alone does not assure effective post-call surveys. The makeup and delivery of post-call satisfaction surveys can significantly influence their reliability and usability.

Consider these 5 best practices based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index published annually by the University of Michigan:

1. Use a scientific questionnaire design. Asking if the customer found the agent knowledgeable and helpful in the same question will not give meaningful feedback and will confuse the customer who may have found him or her helpful but not knowledgeable about the question. Each question should only address one issue. And each question should be straightforward and clearly stated.

2. Define the goal. Know why you are taking the survey and how you will use it before you devise the questions.

3. Keep it short and to the point. Your customers time is valuable. Respect them. And dont forget to thank them for taking time to answer questions.

4. Measure the right things with the right scale. Dont give open-ended questions; word questions specifically and give respondents the choices you want to measure. Using a scale that takes advantage of the phone numbers 0-9 is easy for respondents and converts to a 100-point scale for reporting.

5. Coordinate your survey with other departments. IT teams need to buy into and have advanced warning for any survey initiative. Various departments can make use of the survey results, so make them available quickly and let others know how to access them.

Your customers have high expectations of your company whether you realize it or not. Surveys need to be constructed in such a way as to give companies ideas for moving forward and improving the customer experience now and in the future.

Think of your customer satisfaction survey as a tool to help you take your contact center to the next level, one tier higher than that of the competition!