Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Jeanne Landau – Enjoy!
It is estimated that U.S. businesses experience an annual loss of $83 billion simply because they provided bad customer service (or really, they didn’t provide ‘customer service’ at all). This number is staggering. Of course, people want good service, they are paying for it after all, and with U.S. consumers becoming more sophisticated and knowledgeable every day, they are expecting more, or else they are going somewhere else to get it.
On a more positive note, research also shows that 66% of consumers are willing to spend more with a company that they believe provides excellent customer service.
These are important statistics to keep in mind as more companies are developing a proactive customer experience strategy and implementing programs and tools to ensure they aren’t losing revenue due to a lack of respect for their customers.
Reducing lost revenue and increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty is attainable, but first a company needs to know where they stand on the customer satisfaction continuum, and then take action and make departmental and operational changes to improve the experience they deliver.
Every Department Has an Effect on Customer Satisfaction
The company-customer relationship is certainly not a simple one. Businesses often have multiple touch points with the customer, which occur across several departments, including sales and customer service.
Often call monitoring and quality assurance is thought of as relevant only to the contact center operations, or customer service department. However, responsibility of the customer experience flows though all areas of a business; from sales and marketing, to customer service, even accounting, and IT (think phone trees, websites, etc.).
Analyzing the Voice of Your Customers Leads to a Better Customer Experience
Only the people that are using products and services every day, and working with customer service agents, can provide the most accurate insights on how well a company is doing at providing great experiences, while also providing the data necessary for companies to evaluate their customer service workforce and their performance.
So, how do they capture the golden nuggets that customers have to offer during these interactions?
The answer is simple. Since 90% of Americans prefer to handle issues or customer service needs through a live conversation over the phone, having access to the content of those phone conversations is critical.
However, some businesses get hundreds or thousands of calls each day, so managing the listening and data-mining of all recorded calls can be a huge undertaking, and certainly not one to take on manually. The best way to access that content is through the use of advanced technologies that record and mine audio files (the recordings of customer calls) for keywords and phrases. This is where the benefits of audio mining technology make the process manageable by automatically searching call recordings for specific keywords and phrases. This auto-scanning of call content makes categorizing calls based on subject, and reviewing calls for key points of interest much more digestible.
The search terms can be customized for any business, making it relevant and applicable to any size and type of business that wants to monitor calls for quality assurance, script compliance, customer satisfaction, marketing performance and any other business application.
As the topic of the customer experience continues to trend upward, it is increasingly important for companies to develop standards and guidelines to ensure they maintain excellent service standards, and to keep revenues moving in an upwards direction.
Sources:
Greenfield Online, Datamonitor/Ovum and Genesys
American Express 2012 Global Barometer Customer Service Barometer; Findings in the United States
Jeanne Landau has nine years of experience leading the public relations, social media, and content marketing programs for 800response and CallFinder; delivering telecommunications solutions and marketing technology tools to businesses in North America. CallFinder is an affordable and flexible cloud-based recording and phonetic indexing speech analytics solution that allows businesses to easily record, categorize, and analyze customer conversations to gain business insights and improve the customer experience. CallFinder identifies spoken phrases within call recordings, highlighting calls that cover business challenges like customer satisfaction, workforce training, business and competitive intelligence, script compliance, and more. Contact Jeanne at [email protected] or 1-800-317-8060.
