I was having a discussion with a colleague yesterday and we were both agreeing how we think that perhaps call centres are not improving customer service generally due to;

1. Lengthy and inappropriate IVR that serves the business needs rather than the customer's by filtering a myriad of differing call types before offering the customer ANY service.

2. Agent power; although adequately briefed to handle the small part of the work process the agent is required to do, the agent has limited powers to change any of the processes or policies that underlie it. Thus when a customer has serious issues with the application of such policies or the fact that its application doesnt cater for a previously unthought of eventuality the customer and agent arent able to change anything. Both are 'powerless'.

3. The fragmentation of processes mean that marketing deparments or those responsible for quality only check the workings of those processes and not overall issue satisfaction. By this I mean marketing (or quality) conduct a mystery shopping exercise to measure quality but all it does it check somerelatively simple front end exercise.

Often these procedures that MS is checking are very well established and reliable procedures (eg customer aquisition). Increasingly it is not the acquistion that the customer has the problem with, its the unroutine issues and mystery shopping is mostly unable to measure this impact.

4. As with the above its easy to produce stats to show how many calls you are taking and how may new applications are set up correctly but customer service, as we know from our own experience is not measured by these narrow parameters alone.

Your thoughts appreciated. Rant over.

You've basically hit the nail on the head there. Can't think what to add - customer service should be viewed both at the micro and the macro level, and quality as an objective can only be achieved by considering the bigger picture from a customer and not a business perspective.

John

I couldn't agree more.

I have used "Mystery shopping" in the past to good effect, even though the message was lost on senior management.

However commonly used metrics tend to miss or hide the issues causing problems. For some time I have felt that general satisfaction surveys are often used to self congratulate rather than indicate an issue.

If you are reporting 80% satisfaction there is a tendency to be pleased, whereas we should be looking at the 20%. I have many times suggested that we should report the 20% as the headline figure and target its reduction.

This would , hopefully, in an analysis of this figure and its root causes rather than feeling everything is all right with the world.

If you haven't guessed my experience is within the customer support environment.

DaveC

John and Dave make a number of very good and very valid points. You can't take the customer out of Quality analysis process. The quality of any given call is based solely and exclusively on the callers perception. The traditional fixation by call centre operators on purely quantitative measures ( ASA, GOS, etc.) misses the mark entirely. We must meaure our perfromance the way our customers do. Mystery calls, Customer satisfaction surveys, end call surveys and web based polls are are great tools to gauge our customers perceptions. We need listen to the 'voice of the customer' and be their advocate within our own organizations to ensure that meet or exceed their expectations of us.

Colin

Call centers, Mystery shopping, etc. are tools. How they are applied determines how successful the effect...in this case, customer service. You could have the fanciest, state-of-the-art system installed but if you don't have quality agents on the phones, you're not going to be able to deliver "quality" customer service (the old garbage in/garbage out adage). Which is why CC's are constantly going through a vicious cycle of Production vs. Quality -- we try to maintain a balance since you can't have one without the other. But there's also something to be said for the right business process design. I used to run an outbound CS center for car manufacturers where we'd conduct 5 min. satisfaction surveys a week after a customer purchase and/or service event. Think about that for a second -- an OUTBOUND customer service operation. Anyways, our reports were not only sent to corporate HQ but also to each individual dealership, holding each salesperson/service dept. accountable to its dealership and each dealership to its corporate office. No, we couldn't correct a bad sales/service experience, but we could certainly alert the people that could. In fact, our reports were incorporated into personnel evaluations.

Again, it's not so much which tool you use...it's how you use it.