ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 9) TECHNOLOGY staffing needs. They make email quality assurance a top priority. As mentioned earlier, online customers — after a bad service experience — can easily go off on companies publicly. Ignore a customer’s email or handle it horrendously, and you risk having your call center’s reputation driven through the virtual dirt. To avoid such customer care catastrophes, well-run e-support operations thoroughly and consistently monitor agents’ email contacts for quality purposes. Many have invested in tools that help in this regard — tools that check agent email responses for accuracy in spelling, grammar, and message content, as well as for personalization, and that provide reports regarding agent performance. These tools, coupled with having quality specialists regularly monitor random transactions manually (and provide timely feedback) ensure that agents are providing the level of email support that the company expects and that customers demand. Quality-minded centers also take time to evaluate the detailed reports that EMS apps provide — reports that reveal common problems that can be quickly remedied by tweaking the EMS or by providing coaching and training to staff. Some pioneering centers have even invested in tools that detect anger or frustration in customers’ text, and enable the center to take proactive measures. RightNow’s eService Center system (RNeSC), for instance, contains an emotion indicator called SmartSense that analyzes electronic correspondence sent into and out of the call center. With incoming email, call centers can use the tool as a sort of triage instrument where seemingly angry or frustrated customers are routed to specially trained agents or to a supervisor, while less emotive emails are routed through the center’s normal channels. In addition to monitoring contacts, perusing reports, and redflagging emotive words and phrases, successful call centers seek direct feedback from the customer regarding his or her email experience. Because these customers have already shown their preference for email communication, smart centers survey them via the same channel. This is typically done by emailing a survey invitation to customers immediately following a fully resolved emailed transaction. The invitation contains a link to the actual online survey, which customers can click on to view and complete the questions. The best surveys, according to customer satisfaction measurement experts, contain no more than eight to 10 (and no fewer than four or five) focused questions regarding the customer’s email experience, with at least one of the questions aimed at determining whether or not the customer’s issue was, indeed, completely resolved. For ease of measurement and evaluation, questions are typically close-ended and feature a rating scale of 1-4, 1-5 or 110; however, one or two questions may be more open-ended — with the aim of soliciting more specific feedback (i.e., to give customers the opportunity to elaborate on any problems or complaints they may have, or on any praise they would like to share). Of course, what the call center does with the survey results is as important as effective survey design. Some centers invest in tools that help evaluate online sur- vey results, spot trends, and recommend next steps. As with almost everything else technological in contact centers, companies can go the third-party or hosted route — opting to contract with an outside specialist to host or manage their survey application. Reputable survey vendors can help minimize the upfront investment in technology, and apply their expertise in survey design, data collection and cleansing and analysis, as well as provide consulting services and cogent suggestions — based on survey findings — to enhance customer satisfaction and client centers’ operations. TACKLE THE TEXT Email contacts show little sign of dwindling. Merely going through the motions and handling email haphazardly is a recipe for disaster in today’s fiercely competitive business environment. Customers expect stellar service regardless of how they opt to contact a company, and when they don’t receive such service, they have no qualms about checking out the competition, and/or sharing their dissatisfaction with the rest of the planet. Thus, tackling text-based transactions efficiently and with quality has become a high priority for call centers — at least for those centers that don’t have a fixation on failure. • GREG LEVIN is Creative Projects Coordinator at ICMI. gregl@icmi.com. icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 9 http://www.icmi.com
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