Bringing the Heat: The Importance of Customer Feedback

Improving your contact centre can be a process as simple as asking your customers what’s on their mind.

How do you judge whether your contact centre is successful?

Oh sure, you can spend all day tracking metrics, KPIs, and evaluating employee efficiency, and all those statistics might provide something useful. At the end of the day, though, can numbers and data paint a complete picture of how customers perceive your contact centre? Consider the following statistic by Bain & Company: 80 percent of CEOs believe they deliver exceptional customer service, yet only 8 percent of their customers agree.

Clearly, the perceptions of management and the perceptions of customers don’t always align. Sometimes, a more comprehensive assessment of the health of your centre is needed to determine what’s working and what isn’t—and direct customer feedback (especially negative feedback) is one of the simplest and most effective ways to meet this goal.

Why You Need Customer Feedback

Call centres are unique in that they’re specifically designed to facilitate business-to-consumer interaction—interaction that’s hard to find in most corporate settings. Though contact centres are often thought of as problem solvers, the breadth of their consumer outreach can be ideal for collecting valuable insight into contact centre practices.

Gathering customer feedback can benefit your contact centre in numerous ways:

• Customer Preferences: The likes, dislikes, and everything in between as it relates to how customers perceive your service and the brand you represent.
• Telegraphing Positivity: Seeking out customer input tells them their experience matters to you and that you care about them. Data by NewVoiceMedia found that 53 percent of consumers switch brands due to feeling unappreciated—reaching out to them lets them know that their input is valuable for improving the state of the contact centre and promotes positivity, customer retention, and a better overall brand perception.
• A Fresh Take: Consumers offer outside perspectives on practices that your own staff may take for granted. A consumer point of view can offer valuable insight into call centre practices that may make sense to you, but create issues with their service experience.
• Staying on Top: Feedback helps you gauge market trends by hearing directly what aspects of service are working, and what aren’t—consumers can offer information on practices of competitors and let you know where you may be falling short.
• Agent Assessment: While call monitoring and agent effectiveness should be tracked in every contact centre, consumer feedback can offer specific insight into the performance of your agents, their interpersonal skills, and areas that could use improvement.

Gathering Feedback

Constant feedback provides a crowd sourced barometer for new practices, agent ability, and the effectiveness of contact centre procedures, but how do you get a hold of this valuable information?

Many contact centres provide opportunities for callers to describe the quality of their service after their issue has been resolved. This is a good start, but what about the callers who don’t stay on the line? Or who get their issue resolved through channels that don’t allow the agent to request feedback? While convenient, this type of feedback must be taken with a grain of salt—the customer perception of service will likely be colored by their problem outcome. Those who don’t get their issue resolved are unlikely to provide positive feedback, even if the service provided by their agent was exceptional.

Surveying your customers separately from their problem resolution touchpoints can offer a more balanced perspective. By letting some time elapse between the point of resolution and feedback survey, a more objective view of their service is gained. Offering survey options through multiple channels can help this goal as well—while many people naturally blanch at staying on the line to provide feedback, some may be more willing to click a few buttons on a website or over text.

Improving Your Centre With Feedback

Gathering customer feedback is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to monitor the success of your contact centre’s practices. Not only can it let you know where your current practices are going wrong, but it can be an effective way of reviewing new policies that are being tested. It may take some time to gather enough feedback to apply in a meaningful way (not every customer will be willing to pitch in, after all) but the insight provided by the actual recipients of your service can deliver more concrete and actionable information than months of studying statistics. Curious about more ways you can utilize direct customer feedback for better contact centre success? Take a look at our free whitepaper!