Turning Customer Interactions into Corporate Action and Knowledge

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The best resource to advance your business is right in front of you – it’s your customers! Customer feedback is a chance to gain perspective on the way they think and feel about your business.

To close the feedback loop between customers, agents, and products, companies must examine internal and external feedback. While qualitative feedback is helpful, analyzing quantitative feedback can provide a more robust understanding of a company’s strengths and weaknesses.

The Importance of a Tagging System

According to JitBit, an agent can handle an average of 21 support tickets per day. This might pose a challenge for larger companies receiving high volumes of customer service tickets.

Companies receiving thousands of tickets might not find it feasible to organize and analyze each inbound contact manually. This can result in more urgent customer concerns not being read and managed until days or even weeks after the complaint is submitted. The simplest way to manage this is with a tagging system, which is a method that places keywords on tickets and keeps conversations organized, making it easier to identify and track common trends.

With tagging systems, companies have the control to run analytics regularly on inbound contacts. This allows companies the ability to analyze thousands of tickets in a fraction of the time.

Using tags to categorize inbound contacts will make monitoring and understanding the qualitative data you receive a much simpler process. Tagging also saves customer service teams a significant amount of time and assists in quantifying customer concerns and trends.

Break Down Customer Feedback with CSAT Surveys

To measure customer satisfaction, companies should send CSAT surveys to customers after a ticket is resolved. A CSAT survey asks customers to rate their experiences, share open-ended feedback and voice areas of concern.

CSAT surveys are an effective tool for gathering valuable feedback from customers on the three Ps of your business. These include:

People – Insight about customer service agents, such as their attitude or service
Product – Insight about the product received, such as functionality or faultiness
Process – Insight about company procedures in place, such as return policies or replacement policies

Understanding CSAT scores will help to identify areas for improvement. Creating positive customer interactions should be a priority for any company, but there will always come a time when customers are dissatisfied.

While 68% of customers believe customer service agents are the key to a positive service experience, many other factors, such as products and processes, come into play. Therefore, a company’s CSAT score may look good on the surface due to great customer service agents. However, areas of concern should not be overlooked. On the contrary, customer service shouldn’t be the first point of blame when a CSAT score is low when it might be the products or processes in place that are the root of concern. Instead, analyze CSAT scores to better understand the issues at hand and whether these issues are in the agent’s control.

Eliminating Repetitive Tickets with Internal Feedback

Feedback isn’t only external, but it’s also internal. Customer service agents typically want to provide a solution to customers as quickly as possible, prompting the creation of workarounds.

Workarounds are used to reduce or eliminate the impact of a customer complaint and are often used to fix an issue until a permanent solution has been put into effect.

While workarounds can be a good temporary solution, it’s not a long-term fix. Many agents implement workarounds to handle an issue but neglect to escalate the problem, resulting in an influx of repetitive tickets and no permanent solution.

For example, if a customer complains their product is missing instructions, an agent can go ahead and fill in those missing details so the client can use the product. However, the company fails to address the real problem – that this product is missing instructions, and this will impact other customers.

As customer concerns are brought to light, teams should connect internally with other departments to create permanent solutions to improve customer satisfaction and minimize problems.

The Customer Experience

There is something to learn from each inbound contact. Having the proper tools in place will allow companies to scale their customer service and discover new ways to improve customer satisfaction.

To create a recurring customer base, it’s vital to look at each interaction as new knowledge that can be used to improve. In the long-term, this will minimize repetitive tickets, creating less work for your customer service team, and, most importantly, improve the customer experience.

Liz Tsai
Elizabeth Tsai is the founder and CEO of HiOperator, a customer service-as-a-service solution that allows businesses to handle client tickets faster and more accurately through the power of human and AI technology. Tsai is an MIT graduate with nearly ten years of experience researching and developing emerging technologies.

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