Author:  Jim Mitchell

I just reviewed the results for the 2007 Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index.  This year’s data is especially interesting to me because it provides an in-depth look at what consumers say makes their exceptional experiences exceptional. 

The Empathy and Advocacy (people-related) scores really caught my eye – year-over-year across the board, consumers only rated contact centers marginally higher.  The more compelling story is that consumers who have had exceptional experiences score contact centers significantly higher on each Empathy and Advocacy attribute than other consumers. Why?  According to the research, these consumers say that the company with which they have had the exceptional interaction understands their needs, cares about them and their issues, delivers valuable product knowledge, and has good follow through. 

So, how can your company earn a spot on the “exceptional experiences” list?  Try some of these tricks:

Proactively reach out to your customers – make the most of your predictive dialer.  Start using it to welcome new customers to your company, verify the status of orders, confirm payments, or inquire about the quality of a service call.  Not too long ago, I purchased a gift card from an online retailer.  I immediately received an email confirmation of the order.  But, I also received a follow-up phone call from a customer service representative thanking me for my business.  Impressive!

Step up agent coaching and training efforts – take full advantage of your quality monitoring tools.  Use them to record, review, and report on customer interactions so that you can provide real-time coaching or identify areas for ongoing training.  Over time these efforts will help your center improve your level of service and enhance customer satisfaction.

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I thought it might be fun to keep you in suspense.  More next time…

In the meantime, drop me a line if you’ve got some of your own ideas about improving Empathy and Advocacy scores.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Analytics Tools, Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Dialers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.