Do you know what it’s like to be a customer of your business? Are you developing marketing strategies in isolation without walking in your customer’s moccasins? In this opinion piece, CEO of contact centre software provider ipSCAPE John Palfreyman, argues the best way to find out if your business is customer-focused in call your own contact centre.
So, how do you actually do this? One of the easiest ways is to call your own contact centre. Be a “mystery shopper” of sorts. By calling your contact centre you get the full unvarnished customer experience and can learn a lot about your service from way that your business interacts with the public.
Is your strategy working?
You’ve designed a marketing strategy. You’ve trained your agents, set various metrics, KPIs and reporting structures. But how do you know how well your strategy has transitioned successfully into your business?
Call your contact centre. Evaluate your strategy from the customer perspective. Come up with a common question or problem and see how long it takes for it to be answered. Test the tools you have implemented. Are they working? Or are the nuts and bolts of your strategy failing.
Tip: Record how many times you have to be transferred before someone can answer your question or solve your issue. In an ideal world if your call agents have access to the right information, this should be no more than once. Also, you should call multiple times over the course of a month. While you will speak to different people, it should feel like the same person based on the information they have available.
Experience your NPS in action
For most savvy marketers, NPS (Net Promoter Score) is one of the key metrics used to measure performance. Many organisations also use NPS to manage individual performance. NPS measures on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely a customer is to recommend your business – essentially giving you a metric that expresses the propensity of your business to grow.
Various levers are available to help increase your NPS. A critical element is the performance of your contact centre. Efficient and friendly agents are important, especially in teams where customers are calling with a dispute or a complaint about your service. It is essential that the operators remain positive. If customers have a bad experience, it is highly unlikely that they will give a positive ‘promoter’ score in the NPS measurement.
The ultimate test of your contact centre is to ask yourself honestly, after concluding your call, if you would recommend your business to friends and family. If not, why not? Where did the relationship fall down? Was it a failure of the contact centre tool? Did the call scripts sound false? Or was it something as basic as really annoying call music? Think critically about your experience and map everything back to what you want to achieve as the marketing leader.
Tip: When calling your contact centre, have a positives and a negatives column and writes notes on both. This is helpful when implementing changes to your contact centre strategy as you have concrete examples to provide to your staff.
Ultimately, when calling your own contact centre, it is important to prepare before the call be realistic in your complaints and not be too harsh on your staff. Once the call has ended, use this information to improve your contact centre in its totality and not come down on one staff member who failed to meet your expectations.
