ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 42) EXPERT’S ANGLE fact that the caller hung up a clear indication that you took longer to answer than what he or she would have liked? It certainly seems to me that an abandoned call is a complaint. And what about customers who call after hours? Wouldn’t that obvious behavioral indicators of dissatisfaction, but you need not stop there. Consider all of the calls that get transferred in your center. Can you imagine that those callers were hoping to explain their story to one agent, only to get transferred We typically limit our evaluation of customer satisfaction to surveys only, yet there are many measures of behavior that paint a more clear and accurate picture. be a pretty clear indication of someone who doesn’t appreciate your hours of availability? Our inclusion of these measures begins to address the second reason why customer satisfaction survey feedback doesn’t reflect true satisfaction levels — favoring input over behavior. We typically limit our evaluation of customer satisfaction to surveys only, yet there are many measures of behavior that paint a more clear and accurate picture. Consider the following scenario: As part of a satisfaction survey, a call center asks if customers were satisfied with the length of time it took to answer their call. Ninety-five percent say yes, so the center reports that they are answering in a timely manner — after all, only 5 percent of survey respondents were dissatisfied with the answer time. But 8 percent of callers are abandoning. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say that the percent of those dissatisfied with the answer time is closer to 13 percent? Abandoned rates and afterhours calls are some of the more and have to repeat it all over again? Neither can I. Ditto for voicemail messages, if you happen to engage in the practice of giving callers an option to leave them (a practice we don’t typically recommend). What about callers who are placed on hold? The same logic applies — people don’t make a call hoping that they’ll get stuck listening to hold music while an agent tries to find an answer. Escalated complaints? These are yet another behavioral indicator, whether they are via phone, email, fax or postal mail. Transfers, voicemails, holds and escalated complaints are all behavioral metrics that leave a pretty strong clue about dissatisfaction. Measure them, and reduce them, and you are bound to have higher levels of satisfaction. So are we really advocating considering abandons, busies, afterhour calls, transfers, voicemails, holds and escalated complaints as measures of caller dissatisfaction? To an extent, yes, we are. Clearly, a caller who is put on hold for 33 seconds while an agent verifies infor- mation is less likely to have a serious service complaint than one who has just sent a scathing letter to the CEO. But we need to make sure that our measurements are inclusive, and we need to recognize the importance of behavioral measurements. Yes, it’s a painful exercise. We don’t like hearing about complaints in the first place, so it’s even more difficult to go out of our way to find them. Yet if we really want to measure true satisfaction and address the most pressing problems, there is no choice but to get the full, accurate picture. There are many theories about how to count abandoned calls. Some feel that anytime a caller hangs up before being answered the call should be considered abandoned. Others try to eliminate the “fast-cleardowns” (those who abandon shortly after getting in queue) from the abandoned total. If you decide to deselect these, you’ll have to come up with a threshold that distinguishes a fast-cleardown from an abandoned. I’m of the opinion that if you use a threshold you should set it low — no more than 10 seconds or so. By that time, you’ll have cleared out wrong numbers, and that’s your main goal. • JAY MINNUCCI is ICMI’s Vice President of Consulting Services. jaym@icmi.com icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 42 http://www.icmi.com
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