Deal with the RED flag before it’s a WHITE flag

Open-ended survey questions give customers the opportunity to give the reasons why they scored your company or your service they way they did.  The beauty of the Survey Calibration process is the opportunity to find Knuggets of wisdom that deliver Business Intelligence from the Voice of the Customer (VoC).   In many cases, real-time customer comments like these give insight into problems with the call center agent and customer interaction.  Capturing the VoC in this manner has become vital to engineering the perception of an elite level of customer service experiences.

As numerous studies have revealed, unhappy agents = unhappy customers.  In many cases, post call surveys can reveal the sentiment behind the score indicating that it’s time to re-engage an agent.  Perhaps it’s time for coaching or additional training, or even time to evaluate performance as a whole.

The point here is, the sooner you address the underlying issues that cause unhappy customers, the sooner you can correct the causes of unhappy call center agents:

“Calling your service representative is worse than being in a cave with a lion or a tiger, and a bear.  They ask too many questions.  They are robotic.  If they are not robotic, then they act like they are puppets. They are ‘I’m just doing my job’.  They are insensitive and the experience is terrible.  I hate calling your place.  I hate it.”

“The sales representative was busier talking to himself than he was talking to me.  He definitely didn’t seem to know anything about what I was after.”

“I’m dissatisfied with your company generally.  I was quite dismayed with the offhanded manner with which your representative handled me by saying ‘thank you for your two cents’.  I realize you are in California and professionalism may be a little alien to you, but ‘thank you for your two cents’ is pretty shoddy and tacky.  It was just like your policies.”

“The representative seemed to be almost incoherent, as if she was watching TV while she was trying to answer my questions.  She wasn’t clear.  She just seemed distracted with something else.  She had problems.  When I asked a question, a couple of times this would happen, she would not answer the specific question.  She would restate something else that was unrelated.  I was very troubled by my call.” 

Happy Monday!