Without face-to-face interactions, it is a lot harder to understand how your customers feel, since you cannot experience customer behavior directly.
Running a contact center is like steering a submarine: you need a periscope to see what is going on.
What Does A Contact Center Manager Use For A Periscope?
BigstockContact center managers have two tools—post-call customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and sentiment analysis.
CSAT surveys ask customers to react after their encounters with the company, prompting them to give a numerical score.
Sentiment analysis uses speech analytics to take customers’ “emotional temperature” during the conversation.
I believe that sentiment analysis is a better “periscope” than post-call surveys.
Post-Call CSAT Measurement
BigstockHow It Works
When the interaction ends, the automated survey asks the customer to give a numerical score. This measures how they feel about the interaction. Customers may also be asked to say why they gave this score.
Survey Wording Issues
One popular CSAT measurement is the net promoter score (NPS). Customers are asked how likely they are to recommend the company to their friends and relatives.
NPS’s strongest advocates believe asking how likely customers are to recommend the company is better than asking how happy they feel. It’s not clear how carefully respondents think about the question. They are asked to respond unexpectedly. They rarely have the time or the interest to consider the question carefully. Their response will most likely reflect their emotional state.
NPS’s scoring system may not match up with how customers think. NPS classifies anyone giving a score of 6 out of 10 or below as “detractors,” or people who will complain about the company. Customers giving 9 or 10 out of 10 are classified as promoters, or people who will tell everyone how good the company is. Those giving 7 or 8 are classified as “passive.” Respondents are unlikely to think in such depth. If their problem has been solved, they will give a high score, if it hasn’t, they will give a low score. Some respondents have even given a 7 or 8, because “they never give 10 on principle.”
Penetration Rate
About 3% of customers respond to post-call surveys. This is too small to be considered a representative sample. Where results show poor CSAT, this may reflect angry customers’ motivation to show their feelings or get “revenge” on the agent. It does not necessarily indicate how all customers feel.
Data Aggregation
Inconsistent customer reactions and low sample sizes make aggregating CSAT data a frustrating task. Inaccuracies potentially baked into each result are then compounded by the volume of results.
At a high level, ranking agents’ average CSAT or NPS scores can raise some red flags if an agent has a lower score than the team average. The same can apply to team or queue averages.
Sentiment Analysis
BigstockHow It Works
This is a much newer technology than post-call surveys. Speech analytics software can be programmed to identify and indicate whether customers are expressing positive, neutral, or negative feelings.
It is trained to recognize such feelings based on samples where the speaker’s feelings are known. The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to construct a picture of which combinations of phrases, pitch, pace, and volume match feelings that have been identified in a recording by the AI’s trainer. Where mismatches are discovered, the system can be further trained.
For sampling purposes, the sounds on a voice call can be split into each party on the call and analyzed separately. Sentiments can be identified even when both parties are speaking at once.
Sample Size
This is the major differentiator between sentiment analysis and post-call surveys. Sentiment analysis is usually applied to all calls. It can be applied to all parts of a call, showing users how customers’ feelings change throughout the call. The sample size is likely to equal the population being studied, so the statistical significance of the data cannot be denied.
Sentiment analysis reflects how the customer feels without having to process and respond to a question.
One limitation is that because there is no question, you cannot tell why the customer is angry. The root cause might be the agents’ behavior, the issue with the product, or be unrelated to the call at all.
Data Aggregation
Since the sample size is so much larger, there is more scope for aggregation and analysis. You need to build a set of benchmarks to establish what is “normal” for your population. If a water-utilities contact center handles issues relating to wastewater disposal, customer sentiment will be fairly negative as a matter of course.
League tables showing average sentiment by agent, team, or queue can quickly identify where improvements can be made. Comparing or correlating this with other data such as call length or first contact resolution, you can see how contact center operations affect customer perception. You can see what makes customers angry or happy, and then tune your offerings as a company accordingly.
Although the job market is not as robust as it once was, companies still deal with issues retaining their top employees. In fact, because the job market is not like it used to be, leaders often struggle with why they are still losing employees.
Why do their employees want to leave their current, secure job and take a risk someplace new?
Research on why employees leave companies has been conducted for many years and the answers always come back the same - the number one reason employees leave a company is because of an issue with their direct manager (or overall lack of leadership in the company) and the next reason is because they do not feel they have room to grow and develop their careers within that organization.
If your employees are seeking opportunities elsewhere (and they are not the employees you want to leave), you might want to look into your career development programs. Do you have formal career development programs? If not, it's probably time to get some in place. And if you do, you might want to think about making them more robust.
Career Development often gets mistaken for something that takes a lot of time and resources however, it can be as simple or as complex as you wish for it to be in your organization. And, it is often the more simple things that seem to create the biggest impact for the employee. Career Development can be as straightforward as a manager having a one-on-one conversation with an employee.
This conversation would be conducted to explore the employee's career aspirations and discuss what they can realistically do to grow and advance inside that company to reach those aspirations. "Realistically" means what the employee can do to fulfill their aspirations within the constraints of what the specific organization needs and can provide.
Career Development is much more than spending money to send an employee to a training course and can be as simple as giving them exposure to new projects and tasks that align with their aspirations. It is also as simple as giving them exposure to mentors and other leaders and peers from whom they can learn.
The objective is to think broadly about what will actually develop that employee's career within your company (in addition to and apart from a training course).
The objective is to spend time with the employee to understand what their career goals and objectives are and to explore options that can make reaching those goals possible.
It starts with the conversation between the employee and their manager. Doing this one or two times per year and being actively engaged in the employee's career development within your company can make a huge difference in the employee's level of satisfaction and can limit their desire to seek opportunities elsewhere. Your retention problem could very well be a career development problem and much more simple to amend than you realize.
Andria Corso, founder of C3-Corso Coaching & Consulting, has worked with a variety of Fortune 100 C-suite leadership teams as well as individual HR professionals who want to gain more respect for their expertise.Read more » articles by this approved expert | Click here » if you’re a career expertPhoto credit: Shutterstock
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