Vasudevan Bharathwaj

24/7 Customer

Chat for customer service - the difference between the haves and the have nots…

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Posted on 2010-04-27

Is chat an effective and efficient customer interaction channel for customer service? Absolutely yes. However while chat adoption for customer service is healthy the leverage of chat as a strong service channel is not so. There are many myths on chat. Consequently its effectiveness as an alternative channel to voice gets constantly questioned by both adopters of chat as well as by those who have not yet adopted chat.

Some of the common myths are that cost per contact in chat is more expensive than phone, customer experience and first contact resolution in chat is lower than voice and that it is not possible to reduce phone volumes through chat. All these myths have some common underlying realities. One, the common approach to implementing service chat has either been a technology or as a website experiment, through small pilots to evaluate the ROI and other benefits compared to voice. Second is the low awareness levels on how to leverage and grow chat as a service channel...

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Social media and CSAT surveys

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Posted on 2010-02-12

Are opinions on social media a lead indicator for CSAT? Absolutely yes. With millions of opinions expressed on social media sites such as Twitter/ Facebook everyday it has become a reality today. For example as a company we analyse tweets about several companies through 247tweetview (http://www.247tweetview.com) and when we compare the sentiments expressed by consumers with the end customer CSAT for our clients there is a clear pattern. Companies do not need to wait for a survey to be done/ analyse it and then figure out their CSAT scores are good or bad. The moment of truth is happening every minute/ every day.

Sample this. On an average the CSAT survey responses are between 1%-1.5%. For a company that has a million contacts every month, this would be 10,000 responses in a month. On the other hand a company with a similar contact base would receive anywhere between 50,000 to 60,000 tweets every...

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Managing CSAT Proactively

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Posted on 2009-11-27

Customer Satisfaction Surveys have become the default to measure how content customers are. By nature, CSATs tend to be reactive; they measure the satisfaction of customers long after the customers and the business have completed their interactions.

Most CSAT surveys fail because they ask customers to merely rate the business’ infrastructure and check whether it meets customer requirements and expectations. A number of questions in CSAT surveys focus on how the agent behaved on the call and less on how the customer wants the experience to be structured.

When carried out by independent organizations such as JD Powers or ACSI or NRF Amex, the results of CSATs eventually find their way into the media for wider consumption. This brings the focus entirely on to ratings, with lower ratings likely to send management teams rushing into devising newer strategies. By merely looking at the numbers coming in from CSATs, everyone is guessing on why the ratings went so low....

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Vasudevan Bharathwaj