3rd Party Monitoring

[Analyst]

Has anyone used a third party Quality Monitoring Vendor? I am looking to have our Customer Experience graded. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

[ctaylor]

There is a fundamental difference between 'Customer Service' and 'Customer Satisfaction' that I would characterize as follows;

"Customer Service' is assessing the customer experience from th point of view of the internal quality measures established by the call center.

"Customer Satisfaction" is the assessment of the customer experience from the customer's point of view.

There often is a huge difference between these two points of view. Internal customer service may reward use of the customers name, consistency of responses, call control etc. There are very few customers who would consider these as real keys to a successful and positive experience. Case and point was a call center we recently worked with that transfered one caller 16 times between two departments (because they thought based on the terms used he wanted the other department), these calls were all scored when assessed against the internal customer service metrics at over 90%!

This just underscores that customer satisfaction is what your customer says it is.

Employing an independant third party to assess the quality of the customer experience delivered by your center is a very positive stpe and places you in the leading edge of companies that really wish to maximize their customer's expereinces and satisfaction.

having worked on numerous studies of this type and offering this service to clients we have seen first hand the benefits that this can provide to an organization, including;
1-Better alignment between 'Customer Service" and "Customer Satisfaction",
2-Tactical changes to call centre policies and procedures that have a measurable impact on customer satisfaction,
3- Reduced customer churn,
4- Increased life time value,
5- improved agent morale and reduceed staff turnover,
6- A direct co-relation between the equity value of an organization and their customer satisfaction. The American Institute for Service Quality has stated that a 1% improvement in Customer Satisfaction results in a 3% improvement in stock price.

I would be happy to provide you with some articles and whitepapers on this topic.

Please feel free to email me at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com

I hope that I have added some value to this discussion.

Colin