Hi all,
I'm new to this forum and was hoping to share my views about customer service issues... and to get others' feedbacks...
In think that in order to improve customer experience organization must listene to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and adapte all service elements (People, Policy, Procedure, Product) to the rapid changes in customer needs and expectations. Only by doing so, organization will be able to understand what their customers are really thinkin/feeling about them. In other words: in order to know what you customers really think and want you just need to ask them.

cheers,
Elad

I think that it is just as important to measure the customer experience through the eyes of your Agents - if you do this in a non-judgemental way it allows you to fix any number of broken processes and customer frustrations.

It is now a widely held belief in our industry that customer satisfaction does not necessarily lead to customer loyalty and a number of recent studies seem to support this.

Anne-Marie,

I would be very interested in seeing the studies you refer to - can you let me have more info, please? This seems to fly in the face of common "wisdom"....

I totally agree with your comment on listening to the agents - I have found over the last few years that they are the best source of information for many of the internal issues (product, process, services) that are affecting customer sat. The main issue seems to be that, in most companies, there is no mechanism or forum for them (or even the call centre management) to feed this back into the company. It often takes an external party to point out what is obvious to the people on the front line before anything gets done. We have been finding that speech analytics is a great way to highlight issues in a manner that gets taken notice by the senior execs within companies.

Dave

Of course Lee - visit www.emotionalloyalty.com and/or read Huseyin Gungors book "Emotional Satisfaction of Customer Contacts" as a starting point. Drop me an email via the CCMA link on the resources page of this website and I can send you one or two more papers.

Ann-Marie,

Just too clarify for me, when you said

customer satisfaction does not necessarily lead to customer loyalty

can I assume that you meant that customer satisfaction is necessary but not sufficient to get customer loyalty? In other words, in order to be loyal, a customer must be satisfied with the service, but that is not enough, we must do something extra.

Am I following you correctly?

Best,

Rob

Dave,

Can you tell us more about speech analytics can help you in highlighting issues such that they get more notice from senior execs?

Thanks,

Rob

Thats pretty much it I think Rob - customer satisfaction is the start of customer loyalty and not the destination.

Going way back to good old Fred Herzberg in the late Fifties I think that you could easily apply his "hygiene" factors theory to customer satisfaction.

Dave - apologies for calling you Lee earlier, I was going from your consultancy name for some reason!

W. Edwards Deming said, "It will not suffice to have customers who are merely satisfied."

Fred Reichheld in his book "The Ultimate question" says: “Detailed analysis of
individual customers… typically finds that between 60 and 80 percent of customer defectors score themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” on surveys preceding their defection.”

Harvard Business Review "Why satisfied customers defect" says:“Most managers rejoice if the majority of customers that respond to customer satisfaction
surveys say they are satisfied. But some of those managers may have a big problem.”

The Customer Contact Council says: "20% of “satisfied” customers intend to leave, 28% of “dissatisfied” customers intend to stay"

Hi all,
Here is a quote from a very interesting article, which is written by Professor Bernd Stauss and Wolfgang Seidel - Discover the “Customer Annoyance Iceberg”!

Only a minority of annoyed customers complain
Complaint behavior research and many company-specific empirical studies show congruently that only a minority of annoyed customers complains. The majority of dissatisfied customers defects without articulating their annoyance to the company. Many reasons are responsible for these unarticulated ("unvoiced") complaints: Customers don't expect to get heard, they find it too difficult to find out where and to whom they can complain, or they think it is not worthwhile to take the monetary, time, and psychological costs of a complaint. This behavior has severe consequences for companies because they have a weak and incorrect information basis about the extent of annoyance among their customer and the true reasons for the switching behavior. The number of complaints they register and analyze in their customer care departments is just the tip of the annoyance iceberg.

You can download the full article if you want - http://www.attentivefm.com/Newsletter_Survey/survey.aspx?id=4X4H4H_4H000000u&

Cheers,
Elad

De-emphasize the use of customer satisfaction as the basis for measuring and improving the customer experience. An effort-based measure is 4 times stronger than CSAT in predicting financial outcomes.
In addition, compared to both CSAT and NPS®, an effort measure is more relevant as it enables contact centres to drill down into the key driver of customer loyalty.

Ann-Marie,

What is an effort-based measure? Please assume I have never heard of this (I haven't).

Best,

Rob

A Customer Effort Audit enables you to identify the channel(s) where your customers are expending the greatest effort (e.g., Web, IVR, Email, Chat, Phone) and identifies resources that will help you reduce that effort. Using this, you can answer three core questions:
1)"Which channel offers the greatest opportunity area to reduce customer effort?

The Overall Effort Assessment will allow you to determine where customers are putting in the most effort (e.g., Web site navigability, live channel processes, etc.) and assess the difficulty of implementing change in each channel (i.e., How hard is this attribute to change) to make sure you are starting with quick wins. The audit will identify your greatest opportunity area."
2)"What can I improve?
A series of specific questions will surface effort-causing areas within each channel."

3)"What are the practical and proven solutions to address my needs!
Each root cause of added customer effort is linked to a resource (e.g., best practice, implementation support tool, or white paper) to help you make changes faster and cheaper."

Rob,

Apologies for the delay in replying! Speech analytics provides a mechanism to use the wealth of information that many companies have on their customer interactions that they hold within their call recording archives. By converting the speech files into something that is content searchable (either by translating to text or indexing using phonetics), you can then use common data mining techniques to evaluate each inteaction to look for common threads or issues. For many companies, just understanding in detail why customers are calling in the first place is a huge help, but the real value comes when you can start identifying (and addressing!) the root cause of those calls. In the current climate, non-essential call avoidance and identification of product, process or service issues is vital for both good customer service and costs.

Because the analysis can not only identify the core issues but also quantify them in terms of the volume of calls generated and the time to handle the call, it provides strong ammunnition when talking to the powers that be to get things resolved. In adddition, being able to play back example calls makes the case for changing things even more powerful.

There are a number of vendors offering speech analytics solutions, either as product or services. If you would like to pursue this further, please let me know.

Cheers,
Dave

Anne-Marie,

Thanks for the references - I will check these out and let you know if I need more.

Dave

An interesting article written by Natalie Kouzelous at Oracle that I read today says: "Social media has caused a radical shift in consumers' expectations - they expect communications with businesses to be as quick, interactive and personalised as when they log on to Facebook to interact with friends.
Failure to do so will severely hamper loyalty efforts as customers tune in to more interesting, engaging and rewarding businesses".

they expect communications with businesses to be as quick, interactive and personalised as when they log on to Facebook to interact with friends.

Sometimes I send a message to a friend on Facebook and they take days and days to even read it let alone reply!

But also is the article talking about customer loyalty or loyalty schemes? It sounds like the latter. And moreover about the use of IT (actually Oracle databases) to run them.

Best,

Rob

Here on CCV it takes just minutes!

... did someone say something?

Three days and nine hours later eh?