I was recently asked about considerations and best practices for customer satisfaction surveys and I realized that customer satisfaction surveys are one of the most challenging activities for contact center management to sell to the rest of the organization. Often other executives rely on omnibus corporate satisfaction surveys, which can be great for assessing brand satisfaction, but do little to tell you how the contact center is impacting on the overall brand and customer experience.
To be effective within a contact center assessment environment, customer satisfaction surveys must focus on a specific interaction with the contact center rather than be generic opinion poll on the organization. A survey completed within 48 hours of a contact is ideal. The key elements that generally the survey should address will generally include three areas:
1-Access,
2-Professionalism,
3-Satisfaction,
Access will deal with timeliness of answer, service hours, hold times, transfers etc. Professionalism will relate directly to the agent...were they professional, courteous, did you feel they were genuinely trying to assist you. Satisfaction should surface satisfaction on a few different levels: were they satisfied with the call outcome ( some people we simply cannot help, due to policies, procedures or their expectations), with the agents effort and with the overall experience. This latter segment can easily be addressed through a top-box and/or net promoter style impact on intentions to refer type of question. All of this can be developed in a 10-14 questions survey and can even be shorted with some of the content being rotated based upon the calendar month or period.
You should also look at the channel(s) you employ to deliver of complete the survey. Web and email surveys can be the most cost effective and post call automated phone surveys can be very appealing, but both suffer from an increased percentage of self selection than occurs in phone surveys. This self selection can skew the survey results.
We generally recommend establishing a baseline with live voice surveys and the move to an automated format once the variance between the two channels is established. Phone surveys are generally repeated once annually thereafter. It is valuable to align your internal and external satisfaction measure (QA and CSAT) as they both strive to measure how well we are doing meeting our customers needs. A study we conducted found up to a 30% variance between internal and external sat measures. Let me know if you would like a copy of this document.
3 comments:
Very insightful article, thanks for posting. First call resolution (FCR) is also a major driver of customer satisfaction. Our research shows that FCR and Csat are tightly correlated. In fact, for each percentage FCR is improved Csat will improve an equivalent amount. I invite you to read more about our call center customer satisfaction work on our website.
I believe that one of the things that one of the things that makes a call center effective is quality benchmarking. Let me explain.
A call center that regularly and thoroughly benchmarks itself against world class call centers in its peer group will be able to gain valuable insight. Insight into how and what needs to be improved in the call center to take it to the next level of effectiveness. Based on that, an action plan can be created and implemented, thereby improving the effectiveness of the call center.
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