When it comes to IT management and customer expectations, the lack of news is good news. If the phones don’t ring at the help desk, then all is well, or so we hope.

Typically, in IT management, the number of complaints received is the metric used to determine if work is being done correctly. Unfortunately, this is not always true.

There is always the silent majority that will stop using the service without making any effort to resolve the problem.

I remember attending a sales symposium on customer satisfaction and hearing a story about a gas station on a busy highway experiencing declining revenue.

The owner tried everything. He painted the station, put up new signage, and added hot food, but still suffered losses.

It wasn’t until his gas station was on the verge of bankruptcy that a casual conversation with a friend about his losses revealed that the problem with his business was not the lack of service or amenities, but the bathrooms.

It had a reputation for having the worst preserved toilets. The business owner had just assumed that the cleaners were doing their job.

Such was the lasting impression of the baths on customers. And instead of complaining, they just drove another five miles to the next gas station.

customer churn

In a service provider environment, this is known as customer churn. Service providers will do everything in their power to lock a customer into a contract in order to reduce the amount of sales abandonment.

Without contracts, customer perceptions of reliability and performance can change in an instant, like a newspaper article stating that a new provider has the most advanced network and maximum speed.

Additionally, a network outage that may be outside of the service provider’s control can have a negative impact.

Mobile and Internet subscribers are continually looking for two things. The best performance and a profitable price.

This is also true for any service-oriented business.

Maintaining customer satisfaction levels while increasing growth is a difficult balancing act. If you reduce support resources, there is a direct and negative impact on profitability.

Many service providers turn to self-service or automation tools to maximize cost-effectiveness while reducing administrative and support staff.

A good example of this type of automation is online flight and hotel reservation systems.

These systems have matured to a point where they have almost pushed retail travel agents out of business.

They have managed to achieve this by drastically reducing operating costs and passing the savings on to the customer.

However, even these systems face stiff competition as other operators join the online services revolution.

Price aside, customer satisfaction can now be measured in terms of payment confirmation success rate, website responsiveness, and automatic transaction updates.

The obvious metric for measuring customer satisfaction is repeat business.

Whether it’s a prepaid cell phone user topping up an overdue balance or repeat business from an electronic tailor. Existing customer satisfaction is the easiest to monitor.

Service related issues

The crucial time to manage customer satisfaction from a service experience perspective is when a customer or end user experiences a problem.

Sometimes a service-related issue will only affect a single user, other times it will affect an entire group.

If a service-related incident is not resolved satisfactorily, dissatisfied users will generally fall into one of two categories: verbal or silent.

Vocal users will let as many people as possible know about their poor perception of the service, regardless of whether it is justified or not.

They will write to the newspapers, raise their cause with management, and the service issue will become top of mind for them.

Silent users, on the other hand, will quietly move to other service providers if given the choice.

If they cannot do so for contractual or policy reasons, they will wait until an opportunity arises to object to the service they are receiving. In this situation the response is usually more calculated and specific.

Voice users are an advantage in this regard as they can highlight a deficiency in a service delivery model.

However, it is also important to remember that there is a certain class of end users who are never satisfied.

They will continue to consume the maximum amount of support resources at the expense of other users.

In most cases, the service issues you are experiencing are self-generated or caused by a lack of understanding.

customer surveys

Customer surveys are a useful mechanism to measure the performance of a service. In my experience, customers are likely to be honest in a survey when it’s written and have the ability to post it anonymously.

A customer service representative (CSR) who calls after an incident and asks questions is not effective.

This is because the person asking the question as a representative of the organization will answer according to the behavior of the agent.

Even if a customer has experienced terrible service, if a survey agent is friendly and of the opposite sex, the survey results are likely to be inaccurate.

Creating a written survey consisting of 50 questions is also not helpful as after the first 10-12 questions most people just want to get back to what they are doing; therefore, it will simply choose an answer at random without considering the question carefully.

Survey questions are likely to be accurate if a simple yes or no answer is required.

Organizing the questions in this way is more effective than the subjective answers of multiple choice questions.

Also, there needs to be a good cross section of about 50 questions to build useful survey results.

It is better to rotate the 50 questions in blocks of 10 on a daily or weekly basis, and produce the customer survey response with less data, but more precision.

The best surveys always have numbered options like this:

How would you rate the overall experience of the issue you reported?

1=Excellent 2=Good 3=Average 4= Below Average 5= Unacceptable

Questions with a rating of 4 or 5 should be automatically tagged with a callback to better understand the issue.

This not only helps the organization determine the root

cause of the problem, but also make dissatisfied end users feel important.

Capacity versus quality

A customer survey falls into two categories: capacity or quality. A capacity survey, as the name suggests, is used for planning purposes. It could be an expansion or a reduction of services.

For example, a question like:

Would having an option to log a support call via smartphone help improve our service?

1=Totally agree 2=Agree 3=Possibly 4=Unlikely 5=Not at all

Organizations will often provide services based on their perception of an end user’s requirements. Most of the time this leads to a complete loss of maintenance and support resources.

The previous question could be a good example of this situation.

A capacity survey can come in the form of the infrastructure itself.

For example, you don’t need to conduct a survey asking how long you had to wait in a queue for your call to be answered or how long it took to respond to your request.

This information would be available in the call distribution contact center.

A quality survey relates directly to the customer experience, rather than the supporting infrastructure.

Did the agent who helped you have the knowledge to route your call to the correct team?

1=Yes 2=No

Third-Party Contact Centers and Customer Experience

Although outsourcing has become commonplace over the last decade, it has its advantages and disadvantages.

Technology vendors and service providers may have the best intentions in partnering with a third party, but things can go wrong.

For example, if call center services are outsourced to a third party in a foreign country, issues such as accents and a lack of local knowledge will skew the results of a customer survey, regardless of how well the issue and information were handled. resolution.

The service experience from the customer’s perspective is based on the contact center agent.

It is not based on the service itself. When it comes to outsourced contact centers, one of the telltale signs of call center efficiency is the average talk time and completion time of each call.

If you have the luxury of having a percentage of your calls handled by a local team and another percentage handled by the outsourced call center, you can measure the difference.

If agents are taking too long on each call, two things are happening.

The number of available agents is reduced, creating longer queues. This leads to customer dissatisfaction due to inefficiency.

Completion time is typically the amount of time it takes for agents to update the fault management system or database after the receiver is powered off. And maybe they need to update their supervisor before taking the next call.

Unknown systems or slow data connections to the hosted database can cause the completion time to increase to unacceptable levels.

A well-tuned system can have virtually no completion time. Some contact centers I have worked with have a paperless policy.

This means that agents are forced to enter all the details into the system directly, rather than typing and entering information in a completion time window.

Call centers are great in terms of reporting in this regard as you can see the direct benefit of agent training which reduces both talk time and completion time.

Third Party Monitoring

When aspects of the customer experience are outsourced to third parties, getting near real-time insights into the customer experience becomes a challenge.

A third party organization manages many outsourcing projects and will pool resources to manage costs.

Selecting a service with dedicated staff is costly and often negates the benefit of outsourcing service delivery.

Customer feedback becomes more critical when third-party resources are used to deliver services.