Moving the Needle on Customer Satisfaction Ratings

More than once during my management career, I have been involved in successfully “turning around” customer satisfaction levels in customer contact centers. It isn’t an accident, nor is it just the result of hard work – it is a reproducible process that has more science behind it than you might think. Here are what I feel are the four keys to changing customer satisfaction levels.

1. Move from smile training to skills training
   The phrase “customer service training” has nearly half a million hits on Google. But many of these involve attitude-based “smile training.” In my experience – and more important, according to research – you need customer skills training targeted to specific contact center scenarios. So instead of hiring a motivational speaker to teach courtesy, teach people skills like active listening, defusing anger, delivering bad news, and managing customer expectations. More important, follow service leaders like FedEx and Southwest Airlines  and use role-playing for the most common scenarios in your organization.

   This is one area where your customer service software can help you drive your customer sat ratings. Mine your system for common training scenarios, and then use it to correlate training outcomes with service metrics. In time, your goal should be to make organizationally-specific skills development part of your orientation, your in-service training, and ultimately your culture.

2. Move from deficit-based coaching to strength-based coaching
   Most of us practice deficit-based coaching with our teams: in other words, we find something wrong and try to correct it. But this is precisely the wrong approach to use in a high-stress job like customer contact. In my experience, improved customer sat goes hand-in-hand with creating a blame-free, criticism-free environment centered around learning. Here are the basics of strength-based coaching:
   • Start in a safe place. For example, change “you did this wrong” to “walk me through how you handle this situation”
   • Ask good questions and take a learning posture
   • Understand mistakes and turn them into learning opportunities
   • Troubleshoot facts instead of criticizing performance
   • Speak from the agent’s incentive: more confidence, more skills, greater leadership

   Ultimately, your goal is to move from a stance of “You did X wrong” to “Here’s how to be great at this.” Agents often feel they lack control and are over-measured, so they resist and reject criticism. As a result, coaching works best as part of a broader career development and personal growth process.

3. Measure (and react to) the right things
   The quickest way to ruin performance is by measuring the wrong things. If you demand short calls, for example, then you will certainly get short calls – along with higher turnover and lower customer sat.  The right measures motivate people, while the wrong ones demoralize them.

   Think about what metrics directly benefit customers and the bottom line. I recommend publicizing primary metrics like customer sat and revenues, but keeping secondary metrics (like average handle time, time in seat, first call resolution, etc.) close to the vest – use them to coach people who stray far from your norms, and let everyone else feel they are doing great.

   Above all, think hard about the unintended consequences of your metrics. When you have 12 different performance criteria and a high bar for each of them, you create an environment where people feel they are never good enough and are constantly being pushed in the back. Instead, leverage your own metrics as a strategic tool that bolsters performance AND motivation.

4. Create a culture of leadership and responsibility at the cubicle level
   Look critically at the title and responsibility pool of your agent base: leading organizations put more responsibility and authority at the front line level. When people on your team go from being faceless customer support agents to being training coordinators, team leaders, and subject matter experts, their own motivation and leadership will drive your customer sat. Look at areas like peer coaching, a team-based hiring process, and greater industry visibility in your in-service training.

   By employing techniques like these, you can turn customer sat from something you want into something you plan for – and the results will have a dramatic impact on your morale, turnover, and profitability as well as the obvious benefit of happy customers. Best of success!

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert, author, and former help desk executive. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service and business humor bestseller that was a finalist for the 2008 Business Book Awards, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com

Watch this webinar

The customer experience has never been more important than it is in today’s service environment. Customer service is driven by the customer experience and the people inside a company provide that experience – whatever employees experience on the ‘inside’ is similar to what customers will experience ‘on the outside.’ This thought provoking white paper will compel you to ask the following:

• Is my company in alignment?
• Does every employee understand the vision?
• Do our employees love their jobs?

The Cult of the Customer explores concepts, lessons and strategies that will show you how to build a customer service culture that will make your customers and employees ‘amazing.’ Read this white paper to discover powerful customer service and experience concepts that can help increase:

• Customer loyalty
• Employee morale
• Employee loyalty
• Value to your customers
• Your bottom line
• The value of your brand

For more in-depth insight in to the concepts, lessons and strategies that can help your organization to have a customer focused culture and begin to create amazing experiences, watch the recorded version of this webinar.

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Every day, more than 2,000 online business sites globally – with transactions representing over $20 billion per year – rely on Coremetrics to optimize their online marketing.

Most significantly, the company’s clients are happy. Yet not that long ago, Coremetrics recognized it was time to take support to the next level to drive client satisfaction.

“We recognized the need to provide our clients the 24×7 help needed, but in a scalable way,” said Paige Newcombe, senior director, Global Client Services. “The metrics spoke to the need to offer new support solutions to our clients.”

Download this customer success story and discover how leading marketing optimization software provider Coremetrics increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue with Web self-service.

Can customer feedback help?

Customer satisfaction, an important factor in increasing customer loyalty; essential to success in today’s challenging economy. What can organizations do to increase customer satisfaction and in turn their loyalty? Feedback may be instrumental to the cause.

Companies of all types have long been requesting feedback on their products or services. Companies like Amazon.com, Best Buy and Wal-Mart ask you top rate their products by brand, Netflix asks you to rate their movies, restaurants ask you to rate their food and service, and hotels ask you to rate the quality of your stay all in an effort to determine what their customers like and don’t like, what makes them happy and unhappy, and what they can do to improve their product or service. So then, why shouldn’t organizations ask for this same type of customer feedback within their customer service and support channels? A customer’s support experience can often determine their loyalty to your brand or service. A negative customer service experience can cost an organization a customer and increase the risk of losing many more if that customer is tuned in to popular social media channels – ‘word of mouth’ travels fast. People love to ‘go on’ about their bad experiences and they tell their friends, as well as their social media acquaintances. An integrated feedback process can provide an easy way to capture this important ‘voice of the customer’. Feedback at the moment support is received – during tickets and chats for example – captures information specific to a support incident providing immediate visibility into customer satisfaction. Sprint does just this by capturing feedback at the close of a chat support session as does Vocus, a provider of on-demand software for public relations management. This type of timely feedback allows customer service reps to react in real-time to improve customer satisfaction. Collecting feedback from interactive support channels, as well as knowledgebase articles and surveys, provides the power to evaluate overall customer and account satisfaction. HP uses surveys via a link in an email after a support incident. Integrated feedback processes can enable customer service teams to view individual feedback history across incidents for targeted relationship management, report on account or customer health via feedback and articles, as well as view individual or aggregated customer survey results.

Can organizations that easily obtain customer sentiment and promptly deal with issues that may negatively impact customer satisfaction improve the customer experience and customer loyalty?

Is customer feedback a part of your customer service and support strategy? If so, have you noticed an improvement in customer satisfaction? If you aren’t using feedback, why not? As a consumer would you provide feedback?