Why customer satisfaction matters


Today's costumer has an abundance of opportunities when it comes to choosing a vendor for his services. And as self service becomes a necessity to keep a good balance in the budget, costumer interaction becomes even more important.

This may seem trivial by now. But unfortunately the fact is often lost in less important, but easier to measure, calls answered, waiting times and log on times in the call center. 
A few important facts to keep in mind when prioritizing which data to analyze and pay attention to: 

Scary facts about dissatisfaction
Costumers who experience dissatisfaction will on average in 50% of all incidents complain to a front line employee for BtC relations. In BtB this figure is 75%. As this takes up time, and - worse - frustrates the costumer and employees, it is in most incidents a good strategy to prevent dissatisfaction. 

"But the employee will of course inform a senior manager who then will take action to remedy the problem!"

Unfortunately this is more often than not the case. Most incidents are never reported, and as less than 6% of all costumers pursue minor complaints, the problem may very well never be detected, and thus continues to produce dissatisfied costumers, that churns for no apparent reason.

Customers experiencing that their complaints are taken seriously and are resolved quickly actually display a larger costumer loyalty than costumers who never experienced a problem at all. This is because the good service becomes top of mind, when it has to be actively realized, as it will when it starts as a complaint. So it should be obvious that frontline staff needs to be able to handle complaints and show responsibility towards costumer service, if the battle for the costumers is to be won, or at least not lost.   

The price of retaining costumers versus gaining new ones varies from 2:1 to 20:1 in favour of retention, when advertising, loyalty, transition and start up costs etc. are taken into consideration.

Again it is obvious that there are great dividends to gain from paying attention to the service in the contact center. 

At least twice as many people are told about a bad experience than a good one, and as most people prefer to use companies hey have a good reference to, it becomes paramount to ensure that the word of mouth factor works for your company and not against it. Continuous monitoring of the costumer satisfaction ensures that this can be attained through focused coaching of the contact center staff. 

What do the statements above add up to?
Besides the fact that good costumer service is important, of course? 

In today's professional sports, every athlete has at least one coach to help him improve on his performance. And while the comparison may seem a little odd at first, there are some good points to be gained from comparing pro athletes with Call center agents. Just as the professional athlete, the professional call center agent needs to perform his best every day, and just as the athlete he needs tools to monitor the performance.

And just like the athlete, the call center agent needs to keep monitoring the progress continuously, to be able to spot the behaviours that increases his performance. The stopwatch and the coach for the athlete and costumer surveys and coach for the call center agent. 

Experience shows that working systematically with Return on Behavior has a very high return on investment with a break even time of less than 6 months. 

NOTE: All figures are confirmed by the independent TARP research institute.