Little kids get in trouble all the time, and when they’re ready to come clean they’ll often make parents promise not to get mad before they spill beans. Wanting to ensure mom and dad’s response is not unlike an agent asking for a top score on a post-call survey from a customer they just helped on a service call. But be careful, because engineering and massaging customer experience data creates bigger problems than stealing a candy bar or pushing down a sibling and confessing to a parent.
There’s a big difference between a call center agent asking a customer if they’ve answered all their questions at the end of a customer service call and asking if they transfer that customer to a post-call survey if that customer would give them a nine or a 10 rating on their call performance, i.e. massaging customer behavior. By planting the seed in the customer’s mind about the rating they should give the call center agent, they end up engineering a customer experience vs. letting the customer rate the agent honestly. Good analytics are the result of genuine customer experience data, not customers that have been strong armed into synthesized answers.
Some analysts will argue that synthesized numeric responses are not as important as the actual customer feedback and if your agents ask for the high marks at the end of a customer service call, that it will drive a culture of better service. That the agents will want to deliver a higher level of service for their customers because they know at the end of each call they will ask for the customer to give them a high rating during the post call survey.
Yes we should deliver high levels of customer service during our service calls, always. And we should be mindful of addressing all of the customer’s issues throughout the duration of the service call. But, pushing the customer toward survey responses defeats the purpose of the survey entirely. If the survey is in place to measure customer feedback, and the agent is determining the feedback, then the survey ceases to be a useful tool as a means of measuring the customer experience.
What has been your experience with call center agents? Do you find that you’ve been pushed to give an agent a high score on a post-call survey even when good service wasn’t delivered? How do you manage to these influenced scores? Are less than perfect the only scores that mean anything? But what do they mean?
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