Many companies have already recognized customer satisfaction as a fundamental competitive advantage. In the long term, customer experience is expected to overtake differentiators such as price or product in terms of importance. The influence of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty on the success of the company is therefore enormous. Learn more in this article about suitable measures to increase customer satisfaction and how to ensure good customer loyalty.
1. HOW TO MEASURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?
There are several metrics that are good indicators of customer satisfaction, especially when combined. The following key performance indicators represent efficient control variables for customer retention:
COMPLAINT CHANNEL RATE
With this key figure, you can check whether your customers are aware of your company’s available complaint channels and whether they are familiar with your service hotline, for example.
Number of complaints via a specific channel (e.g. call center) x 100
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Number of all complaints
The complaint channel rate reveals which complaint channels are primarily used by dissatisfied customers. You should take a closer look at the preferred complaint channels and analyze whether it makes sense to expand or optimize them further. Additionally, it’s worth weighing whether other communication options may be discontinued because your customers aren’t using them.
RATE OF SPEECH
A particularly important metric that attempts to describe how many dissatisfied customers actually make their displeasure known.
Number of complaining customers x 100
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Number of all dissatisfied customers (extrapolated from individual survey)
The rate of speech is designed to prevent a low complaint rate from being immediately equated with a high level of customer satisfaction. It takes into account the possibility that your customers may not complain even though they are dissatisfied.
Unfortunately, it remains difficult to adequately conduct one-on-one customer surveys. This is usually only possible via outbound calls. To ensure that the survey remains empirically valuable, it is important to select a random sample of customers.
COMPLAINT RATE
The ratio puts complaining customers in relation to the total of your customers. When the rate of speech is high, the complaint rate is a great way to gauge how satisfied your customers are.
Number of complaining customers x 100
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Number of all customers
There are other key figures that show how customer satisfaction is developing. Churn rate, for example, allows you to effectively monitor how many customers switch to another provider in a given time interval. With the goal of customer retention in mind, the churn rate should always be monitored.
An efficient way to measure your customers’ satisfaction with telephone interaction, is an assessment by the agent at the end of the call. With this method of measuring customer satisfaction, the agent selects between three factors:
- Customer was satisfied.
- Customer was neutral.
- Customer was dissatisfied.
When the customer commends the interaction, the agent selects 1. If they do not say anything about the service, the agent selects 2. If the customer makes a negative comment, the agent must 3. decide. If the agent answers honestly, you can quickly gain a good picture of how satisfied the callers are. However, the data obtained should thus be treated with caution. Direct customer feedback provides more reliable statements, which customers can easily provide with new technologies such as virtualQ®-products,quickly and comfortably after the conversation.
2. WHAT DO CUSTOMERS DISLIKE ABOUT TELEPHONE INTERACTIONS?
The “Microsoft State of Multichannel Customer Service” report discusses what most irritates customers when they come into contact with companies. It cites factors that negatively affect customer satisfaction and stand in the way of customer loyalty.
A total of six reasons are given:
- Being forwarded between agents
- Multiple contact attempts for the same problem
- IVR automation and being unable to talk to a real agent
- Lack of self-help options
- Rude service agents
- The waiting queue
In terms of the waiting queue,the teletalk service study provides further figures on customer expectations that are worth noting:
- Only 15% of customers expect the customer service call to be answered within 20 seconds.
- But only 30% of callers are willing to wait more than 60 seconds for an answer on the other end of the line.
- After 2 minutes on hold, only 5% of callers remain waiting on the phone – the remaining 95% of (potential) customers are lost.
3. HOW TO INCREASE CUSTOMER RETENTION AND HOW TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE?
There is an innovative and simple solution to the problem of waiting on hold over the phone. virtualQ® recognized the negative effects of waiting on hold on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty early on and provides smart software solutions that put an end to this customer satisfaction killer. Whether Web-, Mobile– or Voice-Application, the virtualQ® product range offers the right solution for every contact center to make customers happy. The solutions are not only effective, but also efficient. The solutions often recoup their costs within a year and are easy to integrate into existing systems.
Meet your customers’ expectations and use the technical possibilities to noticeably increase customer satisfaction on the phone. Customer loyalty is thus a breeze!
