In many contact centers, the customer's experience is anything but great. Tracking problem areas is therefore critical to improving these experiences, which in turn improves sales and eventually the bottom line.
But tracking alone does not solve the problem--it merely identifies it. Without taking active steps to improve customer service, all an organization has done by tracking is collect data.
If a company is not going to actively solve customer problems once discovered, it would be better to not attempt to track them in the first place, since this would at least avoid the added overhead.
Image via Shutterstock
Genesys (News 
- Alert) Telecommunications Laboratories has developed six important tasks that organizations and businesses can do to improve their customers' experience.
1. Contact customers who rate their experience (known as Net Promoter Score or NPS) six or lower (on a scale of one to 10) and determine the reason for the low score. Immediately offer some resolution to the problem. Converting these people from critics to advocates is critical, especially since word gets out quickly with social media.
2. Delegate the task of tracking NPS to the supervisors closest to the front lines, so to speak, where customer interactions occur.
3. Instead of using an overall NPS that's vague and less helpful, tie the NPS to different stages in the customer service process. Is the bad experience happening with first contact, or is it afterwards during billing or technical support?
It is critical that once problem areas are identified, that they are solved quickly and that higher priority issues are identified and resolved first.
4. It is never good practice to give customers benefits in exchange for a good NPS. This masks the problem, making it more difficult to solve. Customer loyalty comes from providing a great experience, not handing out freebies.
5. It seems counter-intuitive, but the fact that many customers complain about a given issue, but don't wish to participate in surveys to identify such issues, is a clear sign of a problem. Look for these patterns and when they occur, solve the problem.
6. NPS scores should be tied to other statistics used to measure employee performance. It does not matter how many calls a contact center processes in an hour if the average NPS is a four.
Collecting customer satisfaction data is a necessary step in improving NPS, but is not sufficient by itself. Organizations must be proactive in solving problems and changing common practices, if needed, to provide the best experience for their customers.