You hear it all the time: bad customer service costs companies billions every year. Well, even if that’s true, it’s not your company, is it? The truth is that most companies tend to vastly overestimate the quality of customer support they’re giving their customers. And yes, chances are good that your company chased away a few customers or would-be customers just this week.
In the UK, the Consumer Ombudsman recently released research indicating that more than a quarter (28 percent) of consumers have spent less with a company (or switched to a competitor) after receiving poor service. In the UK alone, this translates to about £37 billion ($45 billion) lost each year. The survey found that the retail sector takes the hardest consumer backlash, followed by banking and financial services and transport.
So what to do about it? Obviously, you can’t fire your entire contact center staff and start over again. The problems may not be in the people, but in the technologies and processes already in place. Too many companies are trying to make do with old technology platforms that don’t have the kind of functionality necessary to compete in a 21st century omnichannel customer support environment. According to a recent blog post by Aspect’s Claire Angood, too few companies are using the right analytics data to make sure their interactions with customers were informed and effective.
“A really vital way of improving your interactions is the sort of information analytics can provide,” she wrote. “You need to make sure that each channel you’re using gives you important insights, which can then give you the sort of knowledge you’ll need to make every interaction the best it can be.”
There are few aspects of the contact center that can’t be improved using analytics. You can employ speech analytics, text analytics, IVR analytics and Web analytics. In doing so, you will gain valuable insight into your customers: what they want and how they want it, and where they may be running into roadblocks while interacting with your organization.
Many modern contact center solutions have built-in analytics that can track these small details and turn the data into actionable intelligence. Workforce optimization, call recording, quality monitoring and even telephony platforms today offer analytics capabilities that can help you begin to collect and make sense of customer interaction data.
“After you’ve established this information, you can look at the most important details that it contains,” wrote Angood. “This will be the sort of data that will help you really improve your interactions with customers. It’s possible to see the number of errors made, how many people hung up and how many calls are being handled per minute, for example. This all helps to boost your customers’ satisfaction. And that’s the key to avoiding further complaints.”