According to several recent studies, customer satisfaction will continue to be the key driver to success for businesses in 2016. Our customers can certainly identify with the following data points:
- 76% of consumers say they view customer service as the true test of how much a company values them.
(2015 Consumer Experience Survey<http://linkis.com/www.bizreport.com/20/Otfk0> - 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent successful customer experience. Most failures were related to disappointing customer service:
35% of the survey respondents experienced poor response times;
30% said the employee they contacted was poorly trained;
31% said the employee they spoke to wasn’t empowered to help;
29% of customers received inaccurate or conflicting information when they did talk to customer service representatives.
(SDL 2015 The Global CX Wakeup Call Report<http://www.sdl.com/ilp/cxc/rules-of-customer-experience.html>)
We bold these last few statistics as they are easily identifiable and solvable using an audio mining solution to uncover occurrences and determine a course of action that must be put in place to avoid poorly trained, unempowered employees in the future.
For example, this business case specifically reveals how one company was able to identify areas of opportunity to improve their workforce training program, simply by listening to their existing phone calls between agents and customers, and leveraging the knowledge they gained to improve processes. Their speech analytics solution automatically scanned all call recordings, not just a sample, in real-time for specified phrases, allowing the management team to proactively identify and address agents’ calls which go off-script, and to do so by individual agent.
On a similar note, Miscrosoft’s annual U.S. State of Multichannel Customer Service Report shows that live conversations between agents and consumers continue to play a key role in the quest for consumer satisfaction.
When asked which customer service channel people prefer to use on a regular basis, the phone wins, hands down with 81% of survey respondents reporting that it is their preferred choice when contacting a company’s customer service, followed by email (78%), live chat (64%), online support (62%), in person (46%), social media (18%), and online communities (14%).
This means monitoring your phone calls for compliance, quality assurance, and overall insights that you can glean from these conversations continues to be more important than ever.
Again, important metrics and straight-from-the-consumer feedback to keep in mind when developing strategies for 2016, and in considering what solutions you need to implement into your call centers to start getting on board with the movement of improving customer satisfaction levels and experiences.
