Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that matters can be measured; not everything that can be measured matters.” As to the correlation with customer service, how do we accurately measure customer satisfaction? Of course, the best way would be to do a face to face interview with each one of our customers. That person can tell you straight out whether or not she is pleased, or she can complain about a product or service, but that doesn’t reflect another person’s opinion, so unless you can ask each one of your consumers, we have to have a more efficient way.
There are two ways to measure customer satisfaction; direct and indirect analysis. Now we have already touched upon direct, but most of us will agree it is quite impractical. Indirect is not very accurate either, because we make decisions about a customer’s behavior. For instance, a repeat customer might be using our services or buying our product because of convenience or even price. Does it therefore necessarily mean they are satisfied with the way their orders have been handled or even the services supplied? At one time, companies used to base their customer service efficiency by guaranteeing that every telephone call would be answered by the third ring. So every organization hired three times more personnel to keep up with the trend, only to find out that customers didn’t really care how many rings it took to answer; customers wanted someone on the other end to be able to handle their problem and get a quality resolution. Businesses found out that it’s much more important to have training programs than to have phone jockeys.
Whether a customer is happy is their own perception. Surveys suggest that 30 percent of contact centers do not have a reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction. Many have relied upon the measurements of call abandon rates, average speed of answering, and an average call length. Fortunately, 59 percent of companies measure their customer satisfaction by their first call resolution rate; only 4 percent of companies however did a survey after the resolution calls.
Organizations might want to consider asking the most important questions when measuring customer satisfaction and making sure the sampling audience is large enough to afford a fair response. All responses have to be recorded in the way they are intended. Companies can’t see customers throwing their hands up into the air because they’re frustrated. Solid clues come from customer testimonials, good sense, and sharing good business practices. When a company consistently sees affirmative comments from existing clients, the potential for new clients is right around the corner and customer perception becomes a pleasing reality.
photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³
