Nearly 400 participants in the Call Center Learning Center online poll identified their top three management challenges for 2006.  Over 1150 votes were cast in the recent online poll conducted by the Call Center Learning Center to reveal the top management challenges for call centers in preparing for 2006.  This series will focus on the top five challenges identified by participants.  The complete results of the online poll are also available.

#1 Challenge:  Measuring customer satisfaction

The top challenge identified by participants was "measuring customer satisfaction", receiving 14% of all votes.  Measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction has become an essential component in providing excellent customer service.  With more and more emphasis being placed on managing customer relationships, conducting customer satisfaction surveys are most definitely a sound business strategy.  Here's why:

1. It is expensive to win new customers, and customer retention is critical for business success.
    
2. It is less expensive to sell additional products and services to existing, satisfied customers.  Listening to what is important to this segment is essential.
    
3. Problems encountered by customers negatively impact their loyalty.  If they are disappointed with the service, they may start looking for alternatives.
    
4. The customer contact center has significant impact on customer loyalty, and in many businesses the call center has more contact with the customer than any other part of the business.
    
5. Most customers will not take the initiative to complain.  Instead, they will not tell you, they will tell their friends and co-workers how good or bad your service was.
    
6. Word-of-mouth is the best and least expensive form of advertising and customers are much more likely to tell others about negative experiences than positive experiences.

Methods for measuring customer satisfaction

According to participants in Prosci's latest call center best practices study, independent surveys are the primary method for collecting customer satisfaction data, with nearly 35% of the respondents using this method (see Figure 1).  Customer satisfaction can be measured by using either an internal service measurement department or an independent survey company. 

Figure 1 - Methods for collecting customer satisfaction data

Please note that the customer satisfaction evaluations should be separate from any quality monitoring done in your call center.  With independent surveys, you will gather information from the customers themselves without having to "interpret" whether or not the customers were satisfied with the service via call monitoring.  Most customers will not take the initiative to complain to the agent.  Instead, they will tell their friends and co-workers how good or bad their experience was.  By offering them an independent survey to comment on their experience, customers have the opportunity to voice their opinions and you can assure them that any problems encountered will be addressed immediately.  This will work well to maintain their loyalty and avoid losing your customers to competitors.

How to measure customer satisfaction

The guidelines for building a customer satisfaction survey are as follows:

1. Survey a statistically valid sample size.  Consider the different types of customers you need represent (i.e. business, consumer, different geographical areas, frequent callers, first-time callers, etc.)
    
2. Word your questions carefully.  Be sure to avoid:
    
   • asking two things with one question, e.g. "Was the resolution of your problem timely and accurate?"
      
   • the use of company ling, e.g., "Was the CARP satisfactory?"
      
   • excessive questions that do not provide information that is relevant to the purpose of the survey.
      
   • questions that could be interpreted differently by different respondents.
      
3. If you use a rating scale, do not offer more than 5 options.  For some areas, you may want to ask both how the customer rated your service and how important that particular element is to the customer.  Finding out what is most important to the customer and acting on that data is more important than simply assessing your performance in every area.
    
4. Pre-test your survey with a few customers before sending it to many customers.
    
5. Acknowledge that any survey is an imposition to the customer.  The survey should never be longer than the original call.
    
6. Keep your surveys simple and short, and give the customer an opportunity to provide open and candid feedback.
    

What questions should your customer survey include?

Customer surveys can contain general questions about what quality of service your customers receive, as well as questions specific to your industry and market.  For example, you may ask the customer to rate your performance on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being very dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied, in the following general areas:

• Overall quality of the service you received?
   
• Amount of time you waited to reach someone who could help?
   
• Expertise or knowledge level of person handling your request?
   
• Speed with which your request was handled?
   
• Appropriateness of solutions and products recommended?
   
• Overall tone and attitude of the person you spoke with?
   
• General comments about our service (an open-ended question that allows the customer to address any issues on their mind)

In addition to the ranking of performance in each area, you should also ask the customer to rank the relative importance of each area.  You may find that you are excelling in areas that are relatively unimportant to the customer, or vice versa.   An example scorecard with sample scores for a customer satisfaction survey is shown in Figure 2.