The Survey Says

By Peter DeHaan

April 23, 2008

When you hear disheartening results from a study on caller satisfaction, how do you react?  If you have pride in your call center and confidence in your staff, you likely view such criticism as applicable to someone else's operation.  However, if virtually every call center manager thinks someone else is the culprit, that effectively exonerates everyone and chastises no one.

Perhaps it's time to set aside call center pride and honestly contemplate the degree to which caller sentiment may be appropriately applicable to your call center and your staff.  After all, if we're not willing to consider negative feedback, then soon people will stop sharing it.  Soon we'll only be given the good news we're open to receive, while the negative feedback will be squelched.

Consider the latest Ouch Point study from Opinion Research Corporation.  It cited that, among U.S. respondents, the top customer service "ouch points" are:

• Agents that are hard to understand (20%)

• The length of time to reach an agent (17%)

• Lack of agent knowledge (14%)

• Being transferred to the wrong person or department (13%)

• Agents who promise to follow through and don't (9%)

• Agents that are not empowered to handle the situation (8%)

• Agents who don't understand the situation (7%)

• Agents who want to debate the situation (3%)

"Customer service representatives are the ‘face' of any service organization and therefore need to be understood by their customers," concluded Linda G. Shea, senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies at Opinion Research Corporation.

Next, to help us better understand and improve customer service is a national study conducted by the Gantry Group LLC, entitled Best Practices for Customer Satisfaction.  

This study revealed that 60% of companies value customer satisfaction programs that help them to focus efforts on those issues with the greatest impact on customer loyalty.  The customer satisfaction data, therefore, that is of most value to these companies is the understanding of the degree to which customer's expectations are met (38%) and tracking the customer's perception of value (37%).  Additionally, the study also revealed that:

• Companies with no formal, periodic customer satisfaction surveys in place are limited because they have too many competing priorities (67%).

• Tying customer satisfaction to employee performance-based compensation is a key challenge to 32% of respondents.

• Seventy-nine percent of respondents are not satisfied with merely tracking performance metrics; they desire the ability to diagnose issues down to the business process level to accurately identify problems.

Another Gantry Group LLC study is Linking Customer Satisfaction & Compensation.  It revealed that two-thirds of the respondents with active customer-centric compensation programs report that the programs were only somewhat successful.  The study also showed that most employees are reviewed annually (37%) or quarterly (28%) against defined customer satisfaction benchmarks.

In conclusion, from the first study we see that in the eyes of consumers, call centers, in general, have many areas needing improvements.  From the second study we learn that 60% of companies value customer satisfaction programs.  That implies the 40% don't value or don't have such programs.  Additionally, companies lacking such programs also lack focus.  Finally, we discover that two-thirds of those who tie compensation to customer service judge the results as "somewhat successful."

As an industry, we still have much to do.