I recently emailed my online brokerage asking how to complete a transaction. To my surprise I received an automated response with an unrelated answer about “how to upgrade your browser.” I picked up the phone, and the CSR who answered resolved my issue quickly. When he finished, I asked him about the automated response. He replied, “Yeah, that auto responder has some quirks in it; I’ve received the same comment from a number of people. I've informed my manager about it, but I'm not sure if it went any further. I imagine it will be fixed fairly soon.”

What an inspiring conversation. As a customer I’d like to think that my voice was heard by this massive organization. What I’ve found out is that my concerns and even that of its employees’ don’t seem to make it to managers and executives with the mandate to make real improvements.

What is the impact of this? Not only did I lose confidence that the broker could resolve problems quickly and accurately; I lost confidence that they actually cared enough to have a process to incorporate customer ideas. I told a few friends, and the brokerage’s reputation suffered. In short, I turned into an opponent.

Acting without listening

Not listening to your customers can cost you. Consider a large telecommunications company in the UK. They had very low customer satisfaction scores, which they believed were the result of lengthy call center hold times. Their first response was to hire more agents. Three months later and another satisfaction study revealed that these agents—an expensive solution—had minimal to no impact on satisfaction.

Listening, then acting

The company realized that they needed to do something else, and implemented ResponseTek’s call center solution as a diagnostic tool to understand what their customers actually thought. The information was provided not just to the call center agents, but also to mangers, and executives all in real-time. They quickly found that customers were frustrated about being transferred to multiple agents. In fact, customers who received a complete resolution to their issue in the first call showed a significant increase in their advocacy rates while those who were transferred more than once became opponents.

After the decision makers were alerted and understood the source of customer annoyance, the next step was to make targeted improvements.

ResponseTek’s solution provided regional, call center, team, and agent rankings according to customer evaluations. This provided a focus for agents, who were given specific information on where they needed to improve, and went beyond mangers listening to random calls for “quality purposes” to mangers coaching only those agents who needed it. The time and resources savings were substantial.

Managers were also ranked on their team or call center performance. Customer service VPs had clear visibility to the front lines by drilling down through cascading scorecards. With everyone working off the same information and focusing on their own part of the business, the results were quickly visible. Within a matter of months their advocacy began rising rapidly. This was followed by a sharp drop of customers switching to competitors.

Simply by listening to and acting on customer experience feedback, this client quickly learned the value of listening to its customers.

Learn More

Learn more about talking to your customers: email us, with CEM in the subject line.