The Ultimate Customer Experience
This tutorial includes exclusive 2010 benchmarking data.

Module 1 - The importance of measuring customer satisfaction

Centerserve's Learning Center is excited to launch a new tutorial series on measuring customer satisfaction. This tutorial series pulls from Centerserve's research-based e-toolkits and best practices reports. Module 1 explains why customer satisfaction surveys are a sound business strategy.  Module 2 will provide guidelines for how to accurately measure customer satisfaction.  Module 3 will explain how to report customer satisfaction survey results.  Finally, Module 4 will focus on setting and achieving customer satisfaction goals. 

Why to conduct customer satisfaction surveys? The numbers say it all.

Nearly 63% of the participants in the Centerserve's latest best practices study named customer service as their primary function (see Figure 1).  This is an increase from 45% in the 2001 study and from 55% in the 2004 study. The steady increase over 5 years proves that more and more call centers are beginning to view customer service as a critical component for business success.

Why measuring customer satisfaction is a sound business strategy:

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.  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.

Outcomes of measuring customer satisfaction

Measuring customer satisfaction provides you with valuable information from the one group most critical to your business success - your customers.  If customer satisfaction surveys are conducted accurately, you should be able to discover the following key insights:

1. Specific areas where customer service improvements are necessary
    
2. Expectations of your customers regarding customer service
    
3. Specific reasons for customer dissatisfaction
    
4. How to improve retention of existing customers
    
5. How to make customers feel valued
    
6. Missed opportunities to demonstrate your capacity to solve problems and win back customers' confidence
    
7. How to improve your competitive position in the marketplace
    
8. Where to spend your improvement dollars to promote customer satisfaction and customer loyalty
    
9. How to generate additional revenue through cross-selling and up selling

Costs of NOT using customer satisfaction data to make call center improvements

Even though your call center may be collecting customer satisfaction data, are you acting on the results to make necessary improvements to your customer service?  There are several risks and costs associated with not using this data effectively, including the following:

1. Loss of customers
    
2. Stress on agents taking complaints
    
3. Escalations to higher-cost resources
    
4. Repeat calls from customers calling back for corrections and clarifications
    
5. Rework to correct errors
    
6. Lower overall productivity

Now that we have established the importance of measuring customer satisfaction, the remaining tutorials in this series will explain how to conduct the measurement, how to set goals for this metric and how to improve your performance in customer satisfaction. 

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