Customer Experience Management allows organisations to manage their customers’ experiences with the ambition of improving customer experience to increase market share and retention. To measure customer experience, companies need a framework that tells them not only how good their customers’ experiences is but also how to improve them and what benefits to expect from doing so. Increasingly, companies are developing such a framework including Net Promoter Score, Voice of the Customer and Customer Satisfaction to improve.

 How do organisations go about obtaining feedback from customers?

There are various ways in which organisations go about obtaining customer feedback for customer experience management:

Contact centre agents – Some organisations ask contact centre agents to obtain feedback from customers either after calls or at a later date.  This is the most costly way to obtain feedback and unless you have lots of spare budgets to spend is not scalable to provide enough feedback for meaningful information.  Cost per completed survey could be between £5 and £10.

Interactive Voice Messaging – The most cost effective method to obtain feedback.  Customers are sent a pre recorded interactive voice messages and ask to take part in the short customer experience survey.  They are typically asked 3 questions and asked to score using their telephone keypad between 0 and 9.  A further enhancement to this service is to provide an opportunity for the customer to leave some comments which can be listened to by the organisation.  Cost per completed survey can range from 40 pence to 70 pence.

2 way SMS – Another effective method used for customer experience management although only limited to mobile telephones.  Similar to Interactive Voice Messaging, the customer is asked 3 questions and asked to score between 0 and 9 with an option to provide free form text comments also.  Questions arise about whether these SMS messages should be free to the end customer or not.  Should you decide that the SMS messages should be free then cost per completed survey ranges from £1 to £2.

Email – Typically organisations in the eCommerce space find this most effective.  Organisations not in this space have a limited amount of emails to get the response rates to provide meaningful information.  Customers are sent an email and then asked to click a link to a website to complete the survey.  Cost per completed survey range from 5p – 20p.

What benefits do organisations see?

By taking part in a customer experience management programme and obtaining customer feedback our clients have seen benefits including:

• Improved customer satisfaction leading to increased customer retention

• Improved internal processes from customer feedback

• Improved call centre agent and field agent skill and performance

• Increased market share as customers promote the organisation

Who uses it?

Customer Experience Management systems are useful for all sorts of organisations and businesses, including insurance, retailers, banks, healthcare organisations, and utilities companies. It’s a proven methodology that has reaped measurable rewards in terms of cost savings and objectives achieved.

Cut waste, boost the bottom line

If your company makes a lot of routine outgoing calls to its customers, you could probably save a lot of time and money by employing interactive voice messaging to handle the bulk of these calls.

Of course, there will always be situations where the personal touch is preferable, but there are many circumstances in which this isn’t really necessary. Let’s say, for example, that you’re running a dental clinic and you want to cut down on the number of costly missed appointments. You could simply set up an automatic reminder call to go out to patients a week before their appointment to ask them if they still want to go ahead with it.

This means the matter can be dealt with swiftly, and both parties are happy. The dental surgery can clear space in its schedule while minimising missed appointments, and the patient is freed from the burden of remembering to get round to cancelling their appointments to avoid hefty cancellation fees.

Know your market

As anyone who’s been in business for any length of time will tell you, knowing your market can make all the difference between success and failure. While conducting market research over the telephone can yield good results, it can be costly if you use human callers.

In many cases, automated telephone surveys can produce results that are just as reliable for a small fraction of the cost. This technique also enables you to reach more people within a much shorter period of time, so that you can react more quickly to what your market research is telling you.

Keeping the lines of communication open

There are many situations in which a quick automated phone call can help to resolve an issue with a customer. For example, you could set up a call to be triggered whenever a customer falls behind with a regular payment, which would act as a gentle reminder to them and give them a convenient opportunity to pay. Or, if they have changed their address, you could send them an automated call to allow them to confirm this change, acting as a vital barrier against card fraud. And, as an added bonus, you can be sure that you approve of how your company is being represented over the phone, which can be an unknown quantity when using human callers.

What is it?

Interactive voice messaging allows companies to make outgoing automated calls with interactive features, such as tailoring the content to a specific recipient, or offering them options as to what to do next. They can be used to confirm information, carry out surveys, or give reminders that can be responded to by navigating a phone menu. Still in the dark? Ok, here’s an example phone conversation between an interactive voice message and a person:

[RING]

You: “Hello?”

Caller: “This is an automated voice message from Woodgrange Surgery to remind you that you have a check up scheduled for this Friday, May 2^nd, at 2pm. If this is correct, and you wish to confirm the appointment, press one. If you wish to cancel or reschedule the appointment, press 2”

You: [presses the 1 key on phone]

Caller: “Thanks. You have chosen to confirm the appointment at Woodgrange Surgery for this Friday, May 2^nd at 2pm.”

Got it now? Good. Time for some other questions…

Can the recipient give verbal answers instead of pressing buttons?

Yes – if the messaging system makes use of voice recognition. This means that recipients can give simple answers, such as yes or no, to navigate through the various options, and also give more specific information such as their postcode or phone number.

What if the recipient doesn’t want to talk to a machine?

This is perfectly understandable. It might be that they have a specific query that can’t be answered using the menu options presented, or they might just be more comfortable with another human on the other end. Either way, these systems can be easily integrated with call centres so that people can have the option to speak to an operator if they want to.

Who uses it?

Interactive voice messaging systems are useful for all sorts of organisations and businesses, including emergency services, pollsters, retailers, banks, healthcare organisations, and utilities companies. It’s a proven technology that has reaped measurable rewards in terms of cost savings and objectives achieved.

Why not just use a call centre?

Without a doubt, the main advantage of interactive voice messaging is the cost. Hiring a call centre to make thousands of calls can be an expensive business, and many situations, such as the hypothetical conversation above, can be handled just as well by an interactive messaging system for a fraction of the cost.

Also, an interactive messaging system can make many calls at once, whereas a human operator can only deal with one call at a time. This means that you can get the same results a lot faster than you would using human callers. While systems such as these cannot replace a call centre in every scenario, it can dramatically reduce the need to use these expensive facilities in a variety of situations.

Many organisations gather this valuable feedback from their customers through surveys. A standard manual survey requiring an initial phone call or meeting and with interaction from both parties can be expensive to conduct. A recent poll suggested that the cost to conduct a survey over the phone using a call centre agent on a predictive dialler can be as much as £10.

So a survey method is required to gather a large volume of data, across the whole customer base for the least cost outlay. The only way to do this is to use an automated communication method.

The options

• Email

Using email to survey customers is certainly the cheapest method. Large volumes of customers can be targeted in a very small amount of time. Interactive HTML surveys which are well designed can gather verbatim feedback for a very low cost outlay.  However email response rates are declining; as inboxes continue to fill with spam customers are becoming less responsive to email and rates on average are below 5%.

• SMS

SMS is the most direct and some figures show that it’s the most responsive channel for gathering customer feedback. However not many organisations have a mobile phone number for their customers and certainly not all of them. In addition, verbatim feedback tends to be brief in SMS format.

• Interactive Voice Messaging

IVM is another extremely effective channel as it provides all the benefits of a manual voice survey (which as we know can be very expensive) but with the anonymity of an automated contact channel. Special software can transcribe the feedback left by customers. The only downside of using IVM to gather feedback is that the survey needs to be carried out there and then by the customer instead of in their own time – this however can be solved by leaving a voicemail message with an inbound number for customers to call back in their own time.

So which is the best approach?

Answer:- All of them

Using a blended approach combining email, IVM and SMS to gather customer feedback gives the best experience for the customer, the largest portion of feedback from your customers and the most cost effective way to capture the information.

Revive Managements industry leading communication platform provides a true multi channel approach, encompassing email, IVM and SMS with the ability to blend all three into the most effective customer survey capture tool in the marketplace today.

• Promoters -  those who indicate that they are extremely likely to recommend, ranked 9-10
• Passives -  are satisfied customers but unenthusiastic, ranked 7-8
• Detractors – those who are not likely to recommend a product or service, ranked as 0-6

CSAT is calculated by subtracting percentage of respondents who are detractors (0-6) from promoters (9-10), to get the final Customer Satisfaction Score. If this final score is a positive number that is generally considered to be a good CSAT.

CSAT can be gathered through any number of survey channels, including voice, text, email, and web.  Personalising the delivery method by channel preference has been shown to increase the response rates, and while CSAT is only a single metric, it allows companies to target follow up to promoters and detractors based on their specific leaning. A principle of customer service says each customer who has a positive experience with your company tells 2 to 3 people of this fact, while a customer who has a negative experience tells 10 people.

The Revive Management solution allows organisations to gather customer feedback across multiple contact channels in a cost effective way.

Our real time detractor notification software immediately recognises customer issues and reacts by proactively engaging contact with them, allowing your team to resolve issues in real time as they happen and improve your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

All organisations will have customers that aren’t completely happy, no matter whom they are. Industry leading organisations  differentiate themselves by having efficient processes in place to turn these detractors into promoters of their brand.

These are the steps that the industry leaders use in their customer resolution processes.

1. Recognise

If you customers aren’t happy the first step is to make sure you know about it. If you make it difficult for customers to voice their concerns then the majority of them will channel their efforts into switching to one of your competitors rather than stretching themselves to tell you why they’re not happy. You need to make the customer feedback process easy, efficient and most importantly pro-active- not waiting for your customers to contact you but instead showing the desire and hunger to hear their experiences with your organisation.

2. React

If a customer has left you negative feedback following their poor experience the time it takes you to contact them is key to a positive outcome. If a customer is aware you know they’re dissatisfied yet have failed to do anything about it then they’re can be unrecoverable consequences leading to your once valued customer leaving to a competitor and worse still voicing their poor experience with their friends and families. Dissatisfaction needs resolving and as quickly as possibly. The key to an effective and quick solution is to automate and streamline this process in your contact centre.

3. Resolve

So you’ve found out your customer is unhappy, you know you need to act quickly to stop the issue escalating what do you need to do?

The key to the resolution and customer experience being transformed into a positive one is communication.

Statistics show that in over 80% of cases where a customer has shown dissatisfaction that the issue can be resolved on the first call- usually by a dedicated resolution team. The majority of dissatisfaction derives from a trivial issue – a customer may have been on hold for too long or felt they didn’t like the tone of the call centre agent’s voice. These customers are showing the early signs of being disengaged with your company through not feeling valued. A simple call and showing willingness to listen is often all that is required. They want to know you care and value them as customers. If a customers issue is more serious they will be a lot more forgiving knowing that you’re taking action to resolve the problem.

This action and proactive approach will create a positive experience. The customers who once were frustrated and voicing their negative experience will be openly promoting the caring and efficient way in which you do business- fast becoming strong promoters to their friends and families.

So how can we gather the feedback, act quickly and resolve these customer’s issues?

Solution

Many leading organisations are benefiting from implementing a customer experience management solution.

Our solution allows organisations to gather customer feedback across multiple contact channels in a cost effective way. Our real time detractor notification software immediately 1.Recognises customer issues and 2.Reacts by proactively engaging contact with them, allowing your team to 3.Resolve issues in real time as they happen.

Nowhere is this more evident that in the pre Christmas period, where shopping logjams and poor response from customer service channels can present a jaundiced picture of performance.

Given that these are factors known to influence customer perception, it came as something of a surprise to witness UK retail struggling to deal with the influx of telephone calls and communications sent either through online forms or email last month.  According to a Multichannel Customer Experience study conducted by Eptica, nearly 52 percent of queries directed to retailers via email did not receive satisfactory answers, and websites encountered similar difficulties – with only half able to answer the deluge of questions from people eager to resolve their queries before the season drew to an end.

Elsewhere the report was equally damning, as the results found that only 78 percent of companies made it easy for customers to contact them by email. In some cases, contact details had been completely expunged from the site, whereas in others they were buried many layers down away from the main shopping action.

It might be easy to dismiss the results as something akin to seasonal mania, but it’s worth pointing out that this was not the result of a short straw poll; on the contrary the information was compiled from 40 major retailers and encompassed product areas as diverse as food, electronics and fashion.

Whilst it would be negligent to say that such approaches to customer experience management are endemic to British business, it’s clear that there were issues to address. More specifically, it is evident that a culture of mutual benefit based on fluent open dialogue between business and client is essential for fostering real commercial and reputational gains.

How can this work in practical terms? Clearly, motivated human resources able to deliver the full experience are essential to achieving excellence; but the contribution of technology as part of holistic philosophy of service should not be overlooked. After all, in a world where messages from all over the planet can be instantaneously sent and received, preparing to maximise positive collateral from the interaction between customer, modern marketing channels and business is a crucial plank in establishing prominent market share.

Revive Management’s range of solutions can bring several customer service management tools together and provide metrics that enable business to send targeted customer satisfaction surveys, marketing emails and SMS messages, thus freeing up capacity and ensuring that the temperature of the customer base can be taken quickly and effectively.
The contact channels – which also include a hosted dialler and interactive voice messaging – run on a hosted software platform and provide the information required to build a cogent picture of how customers view the business.

Whichever approach companies adopt going forward, the take home message from last December must be that where honest endeavour fails, innovation often succeeds – and that is something that business should be looking to address throughout 2013 and beyond.

Self service came to prominence a few years ago and shows no sign of slowing down. In a similar way to mobile applications, self-service solutions enable customers to take charge of their own accounts and day to day experience.  Self service solutions range from making payments, submitting meter reads, providing feedback, viewing accounts/balances and initial sign up of customers.  Smart organisations use self-service solutions to their advantage, extending their service beyond the telephone, right into customer’s mobile devices.

Overall, self service solutions provide an excellent customer experience to those customers that want to use them with the added benefit to an organisation of reducing operational costs to serve.

Collecting customer insight using real time customer feedback applications means organisations can instantly measure metrics such as Net Promoter Scores, agent performance and Customer Effort Scores. 2013 looks set to be the year when major organisations really start to embrace the link between offering a high quality customer experience, loyalty, and longer-term financial success.

2.       Tracking the Voice of the Customer

Speech analytics technology has now reached a level of maturity and affordability so you can quickly determine exactly why customers are calling, examine why you’re getting sudden spikes in call volumes, and also highlight those calls that really shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

3.        Unifying the Agent Desktop

Many contact centres still seem to burden their agents with over complex processes that involve lots of systems and fields to complete. Unified agent desktops can go a long way towards solving this problem, and we expect contact centres to benefit from the latest generation of intelligent agent desktop solutions during 2013 including agent SMS and dialler solutions.

4.       Operating more efficiently through the Cloud

Cloud computing can play a key role in helping contact centres to operate more efficiently, and can help organisations strike the right balance between traditional on premise resilience and the flexibility offered by the latest cloud-enabled technologies.

5.       Self service Payment solutions

Customers are now familiar with using self service as a payment channel, and 2013 will see increased focus on more dedicated solutions including using SMS as a payment channel. These will give customers a fast-track route for paying bills and organisations a more efficient route for collecting debt, bypassing lengthy calls and allowing organisations to free up agents.

1.      Set up a CSAT, NPS or VoC programme

Immediately by setting up a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme you will see an increase in agent performance.  Once agents realise they are being monitored they will begin to perform better.

2.  Ensure you have a cost effective method to gather enough data

So many times we have seen these programmes set up with a 1 or 2 agents actually carrying out the surveys.  The issue here is that simply not enough data can be gathered and therefore results become inconsistent.  Equal sample sizes should be taken for each agent to ensure a consistent and fair measure.

3.     Get agents involved in the process

Listen to your agents.  Get them involved in process, implementation and use their feedback too.  If the agents have bought into the concept you will get improved performance from them.

4.     Share great customer service experiences

Our clients have weekly team meetings to share great customer services so that others can learn from this.  Whether this be simply listening to the verbatim comments from the outbound IVM survey, listening to the original call or both, it is a good idea share all that is good too!

5.     Make KPI targets visible

Make all KPI targets visible to all advisors, alongside their own achievements.  Our clients use our real time reporting to display results throughout the day.

6.     Let the agents listen to calls

Allow agents to listen to the calls during coaching sessions.  It is a great opportunity to point out strengths and areas of opportunity. Sometimes it helps to paint the picture.

7.     Keep checking performance

Constantly look at your performance monitoring again and again to ensure it’s achieving the desired result.  Whatever programme that you have chose to use, use it everyday.  Outbound surveys, whether by Interactive Voice Messaging, 2 way SMS or email, should be Business as Usual (BAU).  This will ensure processes and agent performance are improved continually also.

8.     Engage the team

Engage your team in coming up with ideas for performance monitoring. This means they understand it, buy into it and provide a good customer experience to your customers.

9.    Bonus based on YTD performance

Many of our clients now measure and pay bonus against year to date (YTD) performance against annual targets, so performance daily/weekly/monthly performance changes are not missed.

10.     Build customer feedback into the process

Incorporate customer feedback into performance measures and bonus schemes and direct the feedback to the individual advisors or team managers. Often what the customer thinks is more important to the advisor than what their managers think.