☎ +91 96433 03884

×

Customers are the most vital asset of every business. A study by Helpscout suggests that 80% of companies say they deliver “superior” customer service, However, only 8% of customers agree with that assessment. Customer satisfaction act as the primary catalyst in pushing a company forward, and ensuring repeat business. However, companies cannot create their customer service strategies based on vague data or few interactions and can only trust quantitative data. Needless to say, thorough survey work and few measuring parameters have to be employed to understand the standards of customer service. These metrics will help in improving customer value while reducing the churn rate.

Customer-centric companies make it a healthy practice to determine the customer’s satisfaction levels, very frequently. Marketing teams can also improve their strategies using this particular data. Such practices keep them far from service deficits and place them ahead in the competition.

There are many worldwide methods for measuring customer satisfaction. However, only a few of them provide near to accurate data. Here’s a look at the most commonly used customer satisfaction metrics:

Customer Feedback Through Surveys

Customer Surveys are one of the most common and important methods of measuring the quality of customer service. It is better to ask your customers directly what they think of your service, rather than just self-assumptions. You may initiate different types of surveys on various channels, mostly after the service is provided. Surveys can be hosted in 4 different ways:

a) In-App Surveys:

Customers often tend to overlook such surveys unless they are caught in the action. In-app surveys are presented to the customer while they are in the process of using your service. This facilitates an immediate reaction and a potentially high response rate.

However, such surveys should not deter the customer experience when availing of the service. The survey should be short and precise and seamlessly inserted into the interface.

b) Post-Call Surveys:

The best feedback is received as soon as the service interaction gets over. CSAT surveys can be initiated immediately once the call gets over. The customer can provide feedback by just pressing a key, which is automatically rolled up to the manager in the CSAT report.

c) Email-Surveys:

If you’re looking to ask insightful questions about the entire customer experience, then email surveys are a sure thing. You can also target segmented customers to ask in-depth questions about their situation and feedback.

While these surveys will give you the lowest response rates, still they allow customers who wish to do so to answer in greater details and provides you constructive feedback on your services. You can use this in-depth feedback to create CX strategies and increase customer satisfaction across a wider spectrum.

d) Voluntary Feedback:

Sometimes customers who had a bad experience or an extremely good experience want to let you know of the same and hence it’s also important to offer a way for customers to speak up of their own desire. However, an automated response often deters them from further engagement.

Thus, you should ensure a personalized response or arrange a phone call to understand the customer’s expectations. Furthermore, positive feedbacks can be recorded as success stories to encourage other customers and can be published as a success story on your website also.

Net Promoter Score

As per a study in 2020, 64% of customers are more likely to recommend a brand to their friends or families if it offers simpler experiences and communications. The net promoter score or the NPS method of measuring customer satisfaction revolves around this point.

NPS was introduced to fill in the gaps that CSAT couldn’t as it lacks the predictive power to gauge customer loyalty. NPS uncovers how likely your customer will recommend your product/service to their friends. The scale ranges between 1-10 where 1 denotes ‘Not at all likely’ and 10 denotes ‘Extremely likely.’ You can calculate your NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from that of promoters. The higher your score, the better is NPS.

NPS is ascertained upon the basis of an emotionally motivated question. Thus, the response rate is higher, and often dissatisfied customers never miss this opportunity to answer the survey. Ideally, you should use this opportunity to retain dissatisfied customers and make an impact on them with absolute customer service.

Customer Satisfaction Score:

The customer satisfaction score or the CSAT score is a universal and most common metric used to rate a customer’s recent interaction with the customer service team. The parameter ranges from 1-5, where the lowest number denotes highly unsatisfied, and the highest number signifies highly satisfied. The more respondents give a positive answer, the higher is your CSAT score.

The CSAT is the basic method of understanding the quality of your service as it does not indicate any essential factors from the interaction that took place. The method won’t cover a customer’s principal impression of your company. Similarly, its results tend to be biased, since mildly satisfied or dissatisfied customers will tend to neglect the question entirely. Though the CSAT is an inevitable metric, it is by no means a complete one.

Customer Effort Score

The customer effort score, or CES, is a customer-centric approach for understanding the quality of customer service. It asks the customer: “how hard did you have to work to get your issue with product/service fixed/query answered/service rendered?”. The measuring scale here ranges from 1 to 5, where 1 denotes fewer difficulties, and 5 denotes excessive hassle, and the lower your score, the better it is. The CES is a good indicator of increasing customers’ loyalty by saving their time and effort and shifting their efforts more towards unhappy customers. Most organizations also add a text box after the survey so that the customers can elaborate on their issue, assisting the organization to improve specifically on those fronts.

Web-Analytics

Website analytics is a data-driven metric that works without any direct involvement of the customer. It crawls your website traffic actively, reads your sales funnel, understands your customer behavior, and predicts future conversions. Such insights, if compiled and utilized smartly, can result in the creation of a successful customer service strategy that can be a crucial differentiator among your competition

Social Media Metrics

Customers can reach you from any medium and Social media is one of the most popular one nowadays. They openly flaunt their purchases on social media and even go on insulting the brands who dissatisfy them. Social media is an important channel to monitor customer happiness. Most social media platforms come with a business account facility that provides an analytics dashboard and insights. Carefully observe your audience and focus on their comments, on their recommendations. Customer support teams should gather this data and create CX strategies to improve the satisfaction/engagement levels for a better social media presence.

Conclusion:

Customer service metrics are the food for every business. Ways for measuring customer satisfaction might vary across industries; however, the above-stated pointers are the most successful parameters that are used to guide a customer support team. You cannot improve what you don’t know or what you can’t measure. Thus, measuring customer satisfaction must be a widespread practice at businesses of all sizes, and domains

DialDesk is a company that understands the importance of this practice and pushes a synergetic support system for businesses across the world.

If you’re mapping or want to track your customer journey, there are plenty of things to be kept in mind – and plenty of pitfalls to be avoided.

While customer journey mapping may not a brand new idea, the last few years have seen a steep increase in the impact, the concept is having across the business, and critically, in the boardroom.

As is the case with many emerging disciplines, it’s easy to get carried away and run headlong into it without even fully understanding what your goals are.

Customer journey mapping needs to embrace much more than just a list of your sales and service channels. It needs to deliver a thorough understanding of what your customers are trying to achieve, and the steps they take to achieve it.

A true customer journey map provides a robust framework that encompasses the entire business, how each area impacts the customer and informs your Voice of the Customer (VOC) program to ensure you’re able to capture feedback at the right moments.

Here are some critical Do’s and Don’ts to bear in mind when it comes to mapping your customer journey.

• DO have a robust plan. A journey map must produce value and drive change if it is to improve customer-centricity across the company. Are you going to use the map to boost the customer experience at specific channels? To engage employees? To refine and consolidate your brand? You will probably find that you can do more than you imagine at the start, but make sure you have measurable and achievable aims.
• DON’T forget that your journey map as part of your broad customer experience program. Ensure that the feedback you gather through that program is linked to the touchpoints on your map. This enables you to spot the root cause of any issues effectively and take action quickly where you need to.
• DON’T try to create your map in a vacuum. It’s important that you include people from across your company and from all levels. It’s a great rallying point for your business because you can see how different stakeholders fit within the framework and help them to understand their impact on the customer experience. For example, frontline employees have a pool of knowledge that must be included, and back-office areas like accounting or despatch will hold information about processes that directly affect the customer but are often virtually unknown outside their departments.
• DO remember that your customers would see your brand as a single entity. They don’t know (or even care to know) that the website is handled by different people to the call center or the social media program. Or that some of your services are outsourced or in-house. As you build your map, think about all combinations of touchpoints that customers go through, and consider how well you can deliver your brand experience at each of them.
• DON’T try to create a map based on generic customers. Create buyer personas, fictional characters who are trying to achieve something specific by interacting with your business. You may only require a handful, or you may need more, but the process of mapping the journey is much easier when you can focus on it.
• DO remember that your customer journey map needs to show more than just the point of contact you’re defining. You also need to check, what customers are trying to achieve at that point, why they’re there, how they feel and what external factors might be influencing them. This will help you to build that meet customers’ needs effectively and efficiently.
• DO remember that some things are beyond your control but will still impact how customers feel about you. It might not be entirely fair (roadworks outside your branch or your customer’s internet connection that makes your site slow), but the result is going to be the same. When you build your map, make a note of the things that have or can affect your key customer touch points. In some cases, you may be able to create strategies to mitigate against them.
• DON’T forget to share. As well as your team of stakeholders from across the company, you need to ensure that the wider business understands what you’re doing and why. Most importantly, make it clear to your employees that they all have an impact on your customer journey. Whether directly or indirectly, they play a role in one or more of the key touchpoints, and being aware of that can be highly engaging for everyone.
• DO review and renew/refresh your journey map. Once complete, you need to revisit and review the map on a regular basis. It may not need to amendment most of the time, but in some cases, a new branch, sales channel, or delivery company, for example, will have kicked in and you need to build that into your map. Otherwise, within a couple of years, you’ll have something that looks like an out-of-date atlas that doesn’t acknowledge a major road!

Customers are the bloodline of any business. Without them, there will be no reason to continue the business. Even more importantly, there will be no profits. But, when you acquire customer data regularly, it helps you understand what your customers need most and what do they expect from your product or services.

Gathering customer data is extremely challenging and a critical task too. Businesses now need to be extremely careful with how they acquire their customers’ data, how they store it, and how do they use it for creating long-term or short-term business strategies. A business needs to be transparent during every step of the process.

Let’s explore the questions a business should ask itself and its customers’ when gathering the data.

• How will you acquire data?

  How a business acquires the customers’ data is highly significant. Businesses are using an array of diversified sources to acquire and process their customer data. You can collect customer data by:

  • Directly asking the customer and creating his profile
  • By appending other sources of customer data
  • By indirectly tracking the customers

The most common place to pull data is from consumer activity on a business’s website. Location-based advertising is an interesting method, however, as it uses an internet-connected device’s IP address so that it can build a data profile. Through this data profile, a business can use hyper-relevant advertising methods.

• How will you protect the data?

Another important question a business must ask itself when gathering customers’ data is: how will I protect the data?

It is imperative that every piece of customer data is encrypted and stored securely. Data theft is a real threat to every business. Should it happen to your business, it could potentially close the doors on your company. Therefore, you need to ensure every piece of sensitive data is safeguarded and encrypted.

However, it’s crucial to remember that safeguarding customer data starts in your office. Studies have suggested that employees are one of the biggest threats to data breaches. Every employee needs to be well versed in the best practices of creating a strong password and ensuring they don’t give permission to view sensitive data to anyone who shouldn’t have access.

• What data do you need to make the right decisions for your business?

  This question is important as it will form the basis of your data collection. From gathering names, locations, and age to more personal information such as customers’ income status and lifestyle preferences, this data will enable a business to know who they are catering to and what is their buyer’s persona. It will allow a business to know who they want to be targeting if they aren’t doing so already. Think about the following to understand what data to collect:

  • Name, age, and family status: Single, married, widowed, divorced, and so on
  • Location
  • Lifestyle: Own a house, living situation, income status
  • Education status: High school, a university graduate, postgraduate
  • Occupation status: Unemployed, in work, retired
  • Specific occupation: marketing, retail, IT, engineering, hospitality etc.

• Why do you need to gather data?

Another very important question to consider; why are you gathering this data?

Is it something that will help you create customized marketing campaigns? Will it show you which demographics respond most to your products or services? Is it for feedback on your current products and services? By answering this question, you will be able to gather the correct data.

However, this question will also help you understand what benefit customer data will bring your business.

Above all, the data should paint a clear, defined picture of your customers. This information will be invaluable for the business as a whole moving forward, from marketing to product development.

Gathering customer data is a challenge. Not only do you need to know what data to collect, and how, but you also need to protect and safeguard every piece of information. Only by doing so can you ensure customers continue to trust your business with their data.

Secrets to retain your customers
Suggested Reading – How to reduce your customer care costs without compromising quality?

According to research, over 70% of all customers who leave a company for its competition have no problem with the product. Their main issue is with the customer care offered. This means that customer churn can hypothetically be reduced by 70% with world-class customer care.

The trouble is, world-class customer care can come with a hefty price tag. Data from the Worldwide Industry Benchmark Report for 2015 shows that the average cost per inbound customer service call is $1.30. This is for average customer care. But the minute you want to up the ante, the costs go up exponentially.

That does not mean you give up on the quest for exceptional care for your customers. Here are a few ideas that will help reduce your customer care costs without a negative impact on quality.

• Hire the right people and train them well

  No matter how fancy your software, if you don’t have the right people manning your customer care lines, you’re in for big trouble. By “right”, I mean the few essential traits that your staff needs to have, including:

• A helpful disposition,
• Strong listening skills,
• High-level cognitive skills to understand and address users’ problems
• Quick decision-making capability,
• Ability to pacify irate customers
• Genuine personal warmth and empathy that puts the customer at ease

All these qualities make a stellar customer care representative—one that you’ll be proud to have to represent your business. Once you have good employees, invest time and resources in training them well. Teach them how to get things right in the first attempt, how to mollify heated situations, and how to work together as a team.

As you rightly guessed, such people don’t come cheap. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish by hiring the least experienced or skilled people who apply to your customer care positions. By investing in talented staff, you will improve customer satisfaction, reduce repeat calls, and increase overall revenue in the long run.

• Identify your customer’s problems

  Customers call up your support hotline for a myriad of reasons. It could be anything from solving product issues to maintenance requests. However, with the help of customer support software, it is possible to track the reasons why users call and identify those that top the list. Once you’ve identified the top problem areas, work out a way to fix them. Let’s say the majority of your calls are about monthly purchases. By setting up a simple section on your site that allows users to buy monthly subscriptions, you automate the payment process and eliminate the cost of taking user calls for purchases.

• Proactively eliminate problems

Mike Cholak from Convergys suggests building a “Customer Experience Map.” Map out the path your customers take through your support system and identify processes or products that make for a poor user experience. Fixing these issues on priority helps improve your customer’s overall satisfaction rate with your company. It will also mean fewer repeat calls, shorter call times, and quicker problem resolution, all contributing to a lowering of customer care costs.

• Set up self-service options and make them easy to spot

Customers cite calling call centers and waiting to be served as one of the most irritating things they do in a day. Avoid troubling your customers by offering them information about your product or service upfront, via detailed FAQs.

Some important things to remember about your FAQs section:

• Include a search bar in your FAQ section. This makes it easier for the user to find answers for their specific problem without having to read through reams of questions and answers irrelevant to them.
• Use simple, conversational language over technical jargon. The idea is to make sure the customer can understand your solution without having to call up customer care for clarifications.
• It’s not enough to simply create a great FAQ section; make sure it’s prominently displayed on your website and visitors can find it.

However awesome your FAQ section maybe, some users simply can’t go without having a real person answer their questions. They can’t be bothered to “go on the internet” and dig into instructions or forum discussions. To help such customers, create a self-service option on your customer care phone lines, or provide live chat options on your site.

• Consider remote work for customer care agent

The technology available today can eliminate the need for having all your customer care personnel under one roof. You can build a support team that works from home and is located anywhere in the world at a significantly lower cost than transporting people to your location, paying rent, utilities, and other assorted overhead at a permanent commercial property.

Remote workers have been known to put in longer hours, are less stressed out, and are cheaper to maintain than employees in physical offices. Microsoft’s “Work Without Walls” whitepaper tells you all the different benefits that come with remote workers such as:

• Better work/life balance (60% of respondents)
• Savings on gas (55%)
• A quieter and less stressful environment to work

However, ensure that your customer service agents are equipped with tools and useful software that enable them to work efficiently. Zendesk Chat, for example, allows agents to chat with the customer and each other through a simple web-based dashboard.

The ability to track your agent and customer support team’s performance through analytics will also be useful in helping your teamwork better from their respective locations

Interested in LIVE Chat for your business? Email to get in touch at sales@teammas.in

You need to keep updating your customer strategies to ensure that they are happy with your products & services. Everything from customer marketing with campaigns based on shopper feedback to improving your omnichannel strategy can help you boost customer retention and increase trust and loyalty.

• Really listen to the customer:

How many times have you dealt with a Contact Centre where the customer service repetitive (CSR) has not really listened to your conversation or has interjected whilst you have been talking?

From my perspective, it happens all too often and is really an unpleasant experience.

Many Contact Centres have strong KPI targets set around average call lengths, which in turn can lead to the CSR’s rushing through calls and not taking the time out to really listen and understand the customers’ needs.

Occasions where the CSR is not really understanding the problem can be easily resolved by the proven process of the CSR repeating the caller’s concerns/issues or questions as part of the usual interaction.

This is called active listening and is the old story of getting your CSR’s to slow down, listen, repeat, confirm, and respond!

Of course, the other golden rule is to always train and encourage your CSR’s to never talk over a caller whilst they are dealing with them!

• Speak the customer’s language:

As part of the gap analysis, it was discovered that the Contact Centre CSR’s were doing the customers an injustice when selling products and servicing their needs, which was driving customer attrition.

It is not recommended to bombard the customers with too much technical information, and in-house terminology. This meant the customers became confused and embarrassed during the call because they did not really understand what the CSR’s were talking about.

The golden rule in these cases is to make sure your CSR’s are talking to your customers on their own terms so that the customer becomes empowered and understands what is being talked about.

The Company acknowledged this issue and agreed to implement our suggested initiative of “talking in real terms”.

Once in place, the Company realized a direct decrease of 1.5% in customer attrition from this initiative alone, a winning formula in anyone’s books!

• Servicing your customer beyond expectations:

Do you currently exceed your customer’s service expectations?

Using Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) and providing good old fashioned customer service are powerful tools to help retain customers.

SLAs can be measured against a number of key attributes in any Contact Centre, including, Speed of answer, Issue resolution times, and service provision.

All of these areas are where customer’s expectations can readily be exceeded by not only the measurement of success but also the provision of best practice service.

Imagine calling a company, not having to wait in a queue to be answered, being served by a CSR that engaged with you, understood your needs, provided great service, sold you products that were applicable to you, and generated solutions to problems;  and the list goes on.

Wouldn’t that be a great experience every time you transacted with an organization like this!

After all, a happy customer is more likely to bring in free referral business, generate good word-of-mouth publicity, and remain loyal for longer.

• Offering solutions to stop them from leaving:

Reducing customer attrition through the use of tools such as “Save initiatives” is an exciting subject that could have its own article dedicated to it.

However, I will give you a quick overview of a couple of scenarios that have successfully aided businesses which I have supported.

Firstly there are two types of saving initiatives: proactive and reactive.

Proactive initiatives are undertaken before a customer has left your business and is orchestrated as a reaction to subtle triggers that the customer is displaying that lead you to believe he/she may be looking to move away from your business.  For example, a customer that has recently met the average lifetime value of your customer base could be considered at risk of leaving so you may wish to acknowledge that customer for their custom.

Reactive initiatives are driven as a direct result of the customer advising that they are leaving your
business.  For example, it could be an offer of a discount if they retain their business with your company.

Save initiatives can be as complex or as simple as you want or need them to be, but the implementation of any save initiative within a business and particularly via its Contact Centre operations is a positive step in helping reduce customer attrition.

Best practice organizations have comprehensive Save initiatives with dedicated budgets and empower their CSR’s to be able to offer services/products/discounts as needed to retain customers.

Companies that are starting out on the Save initiative journey can start with simple things like sending a voucher to customers that are reaching the customer average live time value or have not transacted with them for an extended period of time.

If you are struggling with any aspect of customer management, our team has recently helped many businesses get their customer strategies in order.

Suggested Reading:
Reasons to invest in CX

Email to get a reply :sales@teammas.in

In its simplest definition, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes the customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions. Some people question whether product and price are part of customer experience.

Customer experience is actually the “umbrella discipline,” so to speak, while customer service falls under that umbrella. Customer service is just one of those interactions, one touchpoint in the overall customer experience; servicing customers is one action of many that comprise the customer experience.

Journey maps are a way to walk in – and to capture – your customer’s steps and chart her course as she interacts with your organization while trying to fulfill some need or complete some task, e.g., call support, purchase a product, etc. The map (created with customers, from their viewpoint) describes what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in the journey. With the right data integrated into the map, you can identify key moments of truth, i.e., make-or-break moments or moments during which the customer decides if she will continue to do business with you or not, and ensure that those moments are executed flawlessly going forward.

Important to the journey mapping process is to have the right customers and the right stakeholders in the room to create the maps. The right customers are those for whom you’re mapping, obviously. We typically identify the personas for which we’ll map before beginning any mapping workshop; the right customers will represent those personas. The right stakeholders include individuals from the cross-functional departments that are either directly or indirectly involved in the journey that you’re mapping.

The customer service experience is one of my favorite journeys to map because it is such a rich experience; it affords such huge teaching and learning opportunity.

People contact customer service when the product isn’t working right; the documentation isn’t clear; marketing set expectations that the product didn’t deliver; sales sold the dream and not what the product actually does; the invoice is not accurate or hard to decipher; or for a variety of other reasons. Something (i.e., the experience) broke down somewhere upstream, long before the customer even thought about calling – or even wanted to call – customer service.

In other words, when messages are misleading or confusing, when the customer has a complaint about an interaction or a transaction, or when something doesn’t work the way the customer expects, the experience is broken. The resultant action: the customer calls customer service to get help or to get answers.

This call isn’t customer service’s fault. This isn’t a breakdown in service; this is a breakdown in the experience. And so, customer service takes the beating and the anguish from the customer for something that could’ve been designed better upstream. Had that proper design occurred, the number of frustrated customers calling the call center would have been drastically reduced!!

Suggested Readings: 
TOP 6 Reasons to Invest More in Customer Experience

Have you ensured Positive CX at all touchpoints – Get your checklist