Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Measuring Happiness: On the Road to Customer Satisfaction

January 14, 2010
By ContactCenterSolutionsWorld Special Guest
Santanu Nandi, Executive Vice President of Telecom and Media, Firstsource -

While not the first to draw a bead on customer satisfaction, the telecommunications industry has devoted enormous resources to this area of the enterprise value chain. Telecom’s unceasing efforts to reduce customer churn has produced a steady procession of efforts to better identify and quantify customer satisfaction, since it is the lynch pin of customer retention. Indeed, measuring customer satisfaction has become in itself a specialization. Employing techniques such as CTQ (Critical to Quality), VOC (voice of customer) and, more recently, CSAT (customer satisfaction), telcos have tried to guage whether their customers are comparatively happy with their service.


However, customer satisfaction remains elusive. Findings for 1Q 2009 from the American Customer Satisfaction Index reveal double-digit negatives at many leading carriers. The challenges of maintaining a clear picture of customer satisfaction has grown only more formidable as carriers endeavor to do more with less under current economic conditions. Among other things, telcos face the challenge of having to decide whether to devote precious resources to developing customer representatives under their own roof, allowing them immediate access to quality control or outsourcing.

Longer range indicators point to the growing use of external vendors for elements of customer management. According to research firm IDC, the overall telecom sector is expected to lead all other verticals in outsourcing engagements, with a 10.7 percent compound annual growth rate expected in 2010. The mobile market alone, to take one example, has been valued at $47.5 billion, according to a research report from RBC Capital Markets. The continuing growth of this market is spurring a need for cost savings, while maintaining excellence in customer satisfaction levels, in ways typically achieved through the selective use of outsourcing. The fact is customer satisfaction is a crucial stepping stone from operating a business that is stable to one that is continually growing.

A critical ingredient in that progression is materializing with the ultimate measure of customer happiness, the Net Promoter Score (NPS). But before exploring the promise of NPS, it is useful to understand the long journey that customer satisfaction has taken in order to grasp where the industry is headed with regard to this all-important factor.

While great strides have been taken in quantifying customer satisfaction, it is important to recognize that early design efforts to measure customer satisfaction may in fact have played a role in limiting its potential. For example, the approach in the “old days” of meeting with a sampling of customers in order to isolate specific steps in a particular process to create precise internal parameters – the essence of CTQ – turned out to be all about process, and not about customer happiness. Similarly, a reliance on metrics such as average handle time, first call resolution and other internally focused measurements, if over-emphasized, can place undue focus on speed and fulfillment of internal performance incentives, leading to a view of customer service as a transactional rather than a relationship-driven business driver.

In what constituted the second chapter in the journey to measuring customer happiness, an even greater emphasis was placed on customer-contact process optimization. The belief at this point was that if all the protocols of a customer interaction are followed, a happy customer is a foregone conclusion. Again, undue focus on the call-handling process is not a substitute for asking the customer: “Are you happy?”

Without a doubt, progress has been made with the advance of a survey-based approach. An outbound call to a customer immediately post-interaction unquestionably helps in ascertaining whether that customer is happy with how that interaction unfolded. The instant feedback available through outcalls – whether real-time human outreach or automated IVR technology – provides benefits, especially when implemented in concert with email-based solicitation of comments.

This has certainly represented a giant step toward the goal of capturing the holistic customer experience across the “problem lifecycle.”

But if we agree that the long-term objective of any business is growth, it stands to reason that one of the most cherished agents of growth – customer referrals – should be the ultimate measure of customer satisfaction and should be cultivated to the greatest extent possible. Assessment models addressing customer satisfaction levels have for too long fallen short of the this holy grail: a customer who will recommend your service to a friend. A customer who has reason to go so far as to advocate on your behalf is the most potent extension of your sales efforts. But how to determine if a customer who is “satisfied” would actually serve as an “advocate?” Enter the Net Promoter Score.

NPS is essentially the net result after subtracting detractors from promoters. In our use of NPS, we have uncovered a rich vein of insights that companies can act on to raise customers from that first level to the second. There are many scenarios in which customers may be satisfied with certain service levels or offerings yet refrain from recommending or referring the larger offering to their friends. One example is a company that is in the process of migrating from a legacy brand to a new brand. Customers of the legacy brand may assign a high CSAT score, reflecting years of experience and depth of brand maturity, yet evidence a low NPS score, reflecting the real or perceived absence of future-oriented investment in the legacy brand. Viewed in this way, you can see why it’s possible for customers to assign a high CSAT score for a specific offering while not necessarily backing that with a high NPS score. The first does not necessarily ensure the second.

Arriving at a reliable NPS score requires going beyond the frame of the conventional customer interaction model to determine what customers are saying about you holistically. That means venturing into the realm of online and social media, including opinion and networking websites as well as blogs, to collect, analyze and index customer feedback into a “chatter profile.” This chatter profile can be readily converted into an NPS assessment that companies can use to fine tune their customer interactions throughout the “problem lifecycle.”

When it comes to customer satisfaction, most business process third-party providers continue to measure quality from an internal perspective. The idea of going beyond this to discover what customers are actually saying about their satisfaction levels well downstream from a specific interaction remains virgin territory to all but the most forward-looking service providers. This is the next generation of customer satisfaction, and it is taking shape today.

Santanu Nandi is executive vice president of Telecom and Media, Firstsource.

 

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Edited by Patrick Barnard



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