Poll Results and Filling the Gap between Internal Metrics and Customer Experience

Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar called “Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough.” It was an opportunity for me to educate attendees about a critical gap many companies haven’t bridged between internal performance stats and the true picture of how their contact center and communications solutions are performing – in other words, the customer experience. The simple method (or in our case, the cost-effective service) we discussed for filling this gap is Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM)*. As you all know, polls in webinars are good, so we included several in our webinar to get a sense of the make-up and experiences of our audience. Not surprisingly, more than 60% of the attendees identified themselves as IT or service providers.

Much more interesting were the responses to our poll questions about what people are doing today to find out if their systems are working.

* Over 60% experienced outages lasting 2 or more hours
* 30% reported outages going undetected for more than a day
* Only 1 in 3 attendees relied on some kind of monitoring at all to learn about customer-impacting technology issues
* Another 13% get performance news weekly when they review performance reports or have no idea at all

Most shocking of all to us (despite the fact that we sell services to address this problem) was the following poll results:

* More than 55% of the respondents indicated they count on call center agents or customer complaints to tell them about customer-impacting technology issues!!!

Ultimately it appeared that 68% respondents were not proactively trying to determine how communications technologies impact customers.

Can you imagine trying to drive a car that’s low on oil for 2 hours before the Check Engine light comes on? Or driving with a flat tire for more than a day?

You wouldn’t do these things intentionally unless you thought it was too hard or you didn’t have an alternative to fix the issue. Similarly, no one would intentionally irritate customers (and ultimately the agents who talk with customers) hoping their complaints would provide enough information to help resolve a technology issue.

But off course that’s why we held the webinar in the first place…to let folks know there is a simple and effective way to sample and report upon customer experience that also lets you know exactly what’s going on so you can ACT when it matters.

Mike Burke

You Are Here

Last week, we were talking with a few people from a well-known research institute. We were just introducing ourselves and one of the women started talking about quality and service assurance issues for the contact center. She talked about the value of bottoms up and top down metrics for the contact center. But she also talked about a lingering gap that still remains when it comes to the ability to associate this plethora of great information with what is really happening to customers at a given moment. How do you effectively and simply put all that info into context? There are so many cures out there like speech analytics and surveys. And yet the cures sometimes come with more obstacles to overcome like: high costs, information overload, disassociation from actual transactions, lack of real time data and the possibility that the cure could itself impact the customer experience (e.g., a survey).

That’s where we got to jump in and say “Thank you for making our sales pitch for us.” She was effectively describing the gap our services fill.

Do you remember the first time you went to a mega mall or foreign airport? Do you remember how relieved you were when you found the map with the little yellow “You are here” arrow? That’s what remote availability and performance monitoring does for people navigating the megamall of contact center performance technologies and metrics. It offers the simple, straightforward view of integrated technology performance without impacting an actual customer. By monitoring the steps of a real end-user interaction, it lets you know when something goes wrong in the interaction and where to look for the problem. It provides that little yellow arrow saying “start here.” In the whirlwind of data (e.g., AHT, BHCC, abandoned calls, etc. etc.), remote availability and performance monitoring provides context so your data isn’t just data, it is actionable information.

Want to learn more? Join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, March 16 at 1 PM Central or download the recording whenever the time is right for you: REGISTER HERE.

Marla Geary

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Communication Mishaps

We all know business is about generating revenue. In today’s era of social media, instant gratification and self-service, customer communications have a dramatic impact on revenue (just ask Toyota). Arguably, communication is the key to happy customers and a thriving business. And communication mishaps can ruin customer relationships!

I observed an example of a communication mishap at lunch yesterday. Being one of those busy people with an overloaded to-do list, I decided to go through a “fast food” drive-thru. The line was long but I expected it to move fast. It was a “fast food” restaurant and they should be prepared for a lunch rush, right?

After a 5 minute wait (5 minutes = 1 hour in fast food time) the voice from the speaker said, “We are only taking cash right now… is that OK?” I thought to myself “What if it wasn’t OK? What if I didn’t have cash?” Clearly the 2 cars ahead of me didn’t have cash evidenced by the way they squealed out of the line! I even watched one of them go across the street to a competitor.

Think about the goodwill this company could have created by having an employee walking through the drive-thru informing customers about the issue. Maybe those customers could have gone into the restaurant to use the onsite ATM instead of squealing away. I know the next time I’m in a hurry and I don’t have cash, I will pass by this place for sure.

Since I work at IQ Services, this of course got me thinking about communications technology and the importance of first call resolution objectives. Some companies (maybe not enough if you check out GetHuman.com) put a lot of effort into making sure customers know what they need to know in order to successfully complete a transaction the first go around — whether they hit the call center or just the IVR app.

But I wonder if these same companies realize the frustration customers feel when they can’t even get to their expensive, well-designed apps and technologies. A few nights ago, my husband was working on a budget and needed information from the bank. He called numerous times throughout the evening and repeatedly heard an “All circuits are busy…” message. Why didn’t they know their system was down? What good was their first call resolution strategy when my husband couldn’t even get his call through? Like the fast food place, why didn’t they have a backup plan to alert customers to the issue? To re-route them to the info they needed or at least to an agent? I wonder how long it took them to find out about it. I know it was at least 5 hours because that’s how long my husband tried before he gave up.

I wonder how many transaction fees and other revenue generating and customer service opportunities they missed in those 5 hours.

Kristy Buddensiek

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423