How do you assess your customer satisfaction and build customer relationships?
In these days of extreme competition it is vital you retain your customers and the best way to do this is to consistently deliver service levels that meet and where possible exceed their expectations.
MARKETii specialises in monitoring, assessing and reporting on how customers feel about your services and products. We speak with them on a range of subjects to gain a meaningful and insightful view that includes areas such as professionalism, technical ability, timeliness, communication, knowledge, readiness to buy and recommend and overall satisfaction.
There are many areas in which we monitor this customer satisfaction such as, call centres, helpdesk, field service, depot repair and in-branch / store / showroom.
We carry out the data collection, analyse the responses and then provide you with reporting to maintain healthy or build better relationships with your customers. There may be gaps between customer expectations and the service you are delivering.
Our satisfaction and service quality measurements help you first find these gaps and then illustrate where they are and the reasons for them. Remember, the gap is only a problem if you are unaware of it and with our help, you will have the knowledge and clarity to better understand why these differences occur and allow you to target resources against those vital performance gaps.
We will assist by helping design a tailor made questionnaire that will support you in discovering the most important information required on your customers. This will enable us to deliver a deep understanding of the customer experience to improve perceptions of service and strengthen relationships. This feedback and analysis is then delivered to you using our web based reporting packages to enable you to monitor in real time the customer opinions on the services you deliver.
Regular monitoring of how your customers feel will help you understand what you are doing right as well as wrong. Our reporting provides you with the ability to react quickly to customer needs and perceptions and maintain the high level of satisfaction that helps you retain these customers. Don’t forget, satisfied customers stay with you and even help you find new ones!
Assessing your service delivery model is always a hard thing to do. Customer expectations are always high and they want their product or service fixed immediately and with the minimum of disruption. Managing these expectations will always be difficult, but by using MARKETii’s services, companies can monitor and measure these customer expectations to help establish if and where any shortfalls in service exist and to help meet and where possible exceed their expectations.
It is extremely important that you monitor your processes. A great deal of work is done on checking internal measurements and KPI’s, but reviewing what the customer thinks and feels about your service delivery model is of paramount importance.
MARKETii appreciates there are different ways to provide customer support and realises there are key variants to how this is done. By using targeted questions within our surveys we help you review the varied process from the customers perspective and give you the real feedback as to your performance through their eyes and what (if anything) they feel can be improved.
Clients use our services for many reasons including:
• Quickly and directly establish how and where they can improve the customer experience and service quality
• Establishing best practices to use within the organisation
• Internal and external benchmarking
• Reviewing where shortfalls in service and satisfaction are taking place and being able to respond with change
• Monitoring third party service providers to ensure they are delivery the clients required service standards, and also related to their payment schemes
• Setting pay for performance criteria for staff relating to their satisfaction ratings by customers
• Using the information to assist with performance appraisals
• Understanding where communication is most valid in the process and building the customer satisfaction
• Identifying training needs
Assessing call centre matrix from an internal point has always been done. Calls per minute, first call resolution, time taken etc are all part of the usual balanced score card. But what do your customers think? How do they perceive your service and the agent that delivered it ?
Using MARKETii to ask questions to your customers in their native language provides a detailed and accurate insight into what they feel, want and receive.
Questions can relate to:
• speed of response
• views on the call menu options
• technical ability, knowledge and professionalism of the agent
• their communication skills
• overall satisfaction
• would they re use the service or recommend to others
We also look to gain an understanding of the parameters of service from the customers perspective such as what do they feel you can improve upon and what they see as being most important to them.
The key difference to this service delivery type is that the customer often comes into physical contact with your company through your field technician/engineer. Therefore, it is vital that he/she has the soft skills to communicate in the right way with your customers. Your company and products will be judged on the way the technician/engineer deals with the customer and the issue in hand.
Using MARKETii’s follow up services will provide you with a full insight into the customers views on the many areas including:
• overall satisfaction with the service visit
• the timing of arrival and time spent on the job
• how many days are acceptable to the customer
• the professionalism of the technician
• the communication abilities of the technician
• the technicians technical ability and knowledge to enable him/her to resolve the issue
Another area that has been illustrated on many occasions is that the field technician/engineer is your silent sales force. Your customers trust these people and the advice they impart. By using our survey process we can help you establish who are the best people out their in the field and what it is that they are doing right. This information can then be used to pass on to others and build on the customer satisfaction experience.
The reporting will allow you to compare technician/engineer abilities, establish best practice and improve training and therefore service delivery.
How do you maintain and improve customer satisfaction with customers who send off their product to you or to a repair centre and don’t have direct contact with you? How do you keep them informed? How do you build loyalty?
It is imperative that the communication process works efficiently and smoothly in keeping the customer informed all through the repair. Starting with the ease of finding the number to call or the address of the centre to drop off the product, the customer experience starts well before they have actually made contact.
Once the product has been sent for repair, the time taken for the repair, the costs (if any) and how the product will be returned all need to be communicated to the customer.
MARKETii contact your customers following a depot repair and establish a range of feedback including
• ease of making contact,
• ease of drop off, collection
• communication
• speed of whole process
• return of goods in correct packaging.
• involvement and assessment of any telephone or personal contact
• has the service you received improved your view of the products company
Our analysis and reporting procedures will allow you to highlight shortfalls in the customer experience immediately when something is wrong. Your managers will then be able to rectify any customer concerns and in turn satisfy them. The actions taken by your company will help retain these customers and they will go on to advocate your services.
Marketii contact customer of your company after they have visited one of your branches (banking etc), stores (retail etc), showrooms (automotive etc).
You as a company may be looking to measure overall feedback or to target particular experiences, services or products.
Marketii’s services can help you profile particular customer groupings such as;
• Age groups
• Account types
• Geographic and demographic
• Product or services purchased
• Non take-up of product or services (help establish why people did not buy)
As well as looking at the particular customer interaction the surveys also may assess and measure the customers views on;
• location
• Ease of access
• Appearance / style / cleanliness
• Greeting from staff (addressing customer by name etc)
• Speed of service
• Likeliness to re use services
• Likeliness to recommend company and / or personnel
How loyal are your customers and would they recommend your company only or your product or services to others?
Through asking the correct combination of questions we will provide you with the metrics to monitor your customer loyalty. By assessing your customers drive and desire to re-purchase and recommend your products and services to others you can see (and in some cases reward) these customers for their loyalty. Having customer advocates out in the market place is of paramount importance to sustaining and building your market share. Many of the questions asked in this area are often included with our customer satisfaction and service quality programs. These include service areas such as call centers, helpdesks, field service and depot repair experiences.
Questions often used for these areas include, how likely customers are to:
• Recommend your services or products to others
• Recommend others to use this service provider
• Re-use your service
• Re-purchase your products or services.
MARKETii helps you establish a loyalty score card that allows you to view who are your most valuable customers and those who will promote your products and services. Our services illustrate go on the highlight what it is that you are doing right with these people and learn lessons to ensure a higher percentage of your customers are receiving this level of service. We also help you learn from those who have had a bad experience and help understand how you can get these customers back on board.
There is a direct correlation between employee and customer satisfaction. Have a happy and well trained group of employees and you will see this filter through to the service they provide to your customers. Some companies and organisations will try to find out by conducting some internal research, by offering their employees opinion questionnaires. However, experience shows that employees use these questionnaires to mainly express dissatisfaction; they tend to focus on pay and do not answer questions in other areas such as communication. Consequently, the results will mainly cover issues that are very difficult to action (for e.g. give all employees a 5% pay increase) and as a result the employees lose confidence with the process and the response rate falls.
Marketii will get a more thorough response for you. We will speak to your employees and ask them questions to find out what they really think about a range of areas such as the company, communication, leadership, working environment, process, reward and management and not only questions relating to their pay (we will leave those until the end!). Returned answers can be made anonymous on request as these surveys can tackle delicate areas.
The opinions are then delivered to you in a proactive approach with executive summaries, useable and succinct reporting to enable decisions and changes to be made where required.
Maintaining a content and motivated workforce will affect the way your employees interact with your customers and as they are important in creating the right perception it is vital that you continue to monitor their satisfaction. Using this type of program in conjunction with the customer satisfaction programs helps highlight the effect that poor employee moral and satisfaction can have on the services they are providing.
Many of our clients closely monitor the link and performance of these two programs to enable a better approach and support to their employees, thus enabling the solid customer focused ethos to be continued through into the way everyone works and delivers high levels of service to the customer.
To calculate your company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are promoters (those who are highly likely to recommend your company or products), and subtract the percentage who are detractors (those who are less likely to recommend your company or products). The equation below is how to calculate a company's NPS.
% of Promoters - % of Detractors = Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Power of the NPS
The NPS provides the means for gauging performance, establishing accountability, and prioritizing investments because it connects to growth. If a company's "growth engine" were running at perfect efficiency, it would convert 100% of its customers into promoters. The worst possible engine would convert 100% of its customers into detractors. The best way to gauge the efficiency of the growth engine is to calculate a company's NPS.
There is one question that provides the best predictor of customer loyalty and for the vast majority of business: How likely is it that you would recommend (Company X) to a friend or colleague? The "Net Promoter Score" or NPS, is simply the percentage of customers whose answers identify them as promoters minus the percentage whose response indicates they are detractors. Comparable to a financial net worth that takes the assets minus the liabilities, NPS provides a customer net worth by subtracting the liabilities (detractors) from the assets (promoters). NPS provides the single most reliable indicator of a company's ability to grow. Companies that have pioneered the use of this metric are way out ahead of their competitors. In most industries, the Net Promoter leader has superior growth - averaging more than twice the rate of their competition.
How Do Companies Stack Up on This Measurement?
Those with the most efficient growth engines - companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, Costco, Vanguard, and Dell - operate at NPS efficiency ratings of 50 to 80%. So even they have room for improvement. But the average firm sputters along at an NPS efficiency of only 5 to 10%. In other words, promoters barely outnumber detractors. Many firms - and some entire industries - have negative Net Promoter Scores, which means that they are creating more detractors than promoters day in and day out. These low scores explain why so many companies can't deliver profitable, sustainable growth, no matter how aggressively they spend to acquire new business.
Three Categories of Customers
NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company's customers can be divided into three categories. Customers can be categorized according to their answer to the Ultimate Question based on a 0-to-10 point rating scale with "0" representing the extreme negative and "10" representing the extreme positive end.
• Promoters (those who answer 5) are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do so.
• Passives (those who answer 4) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition.
• Detractors (those who answer 1-3) are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship
WHAT TO DO WITH THE ANSWERS?
Act Upon" the Three Groups of Customers
Grouping customers into these three clusters – PROMOTERS, PASSIVES AND DETRACTORS - provides a simple, intuitive scheme that accurately predicts customer behaviour. Most important, it's a scheme that can be acted upon. Frontline managers can grasp the idea of increasing the number of promoters and reducing the number of detractors a lot more readily than the idea of raising the customer satisfaction index by one standard deviation.
Tune Your Company's Growth Engine
The ultimate test for any customer-relationship metric is whether it helps the organization tune its growth engine to operate at peak efficiency. Does it help employees clarify and simplify the job of delighting customers? Does it allow them to compare their performance from week to week and month to month? The notion of promoters, passives, and detractors does all this, and helps companies turn into NPS.
Increase Promoters and Decrease Detractors
But the business goal here isn't merely to delight customers, it's to turn them into promoters - customers who buy more, and who actively refer friends and colleagues. That's the behaviour that contributes to growth. A company seeking growth must increase the percentage of promoters and decrease the percentage of detractors. These are two distinct processes that must be managed, and net promoter scores capture both.
How good is your Account Manager? How much do your relationship managers understand about how your business operates and the challenges it faces. Do you have little or irregular contact with your customers? And are your customers happy with the ongoing service they receive?
Your customers may buy a product or service on an irregular basis or even once every couple of years, so how do you maintain the relationship so that when they decide to buy they think of you?
By carrying out relationship based surveys, MARKETii helps you better understand the needs and requirements of these customers. Through having this work carried out by an independent company, customers open up their views on a wider range of areas and provide more insightful feedback as to their thoughts.
Conducting surveys with your customers will give you the best angle from which to communicate with them and the timing of this interaction. Too much contact can annoy the customer, too little and you may miss the opportunity. In addition, the customer can provide feedback on your Account/Sales and Service Managers and the role they are doing.
Asking questions such as:
• how regularly do they want to be contacted?
• how do they wish to be contacted?
• What value do they bring to the client?
• Do they have a full understanding of the customer’s needs and their businesses?
• What are the reasons for the communication?
• What is their buying cycle?
• Would they recommend your service / product?
• How they rate the skills of the Manager, such as:
o Professionalism
o Ability and knowledge
o Timing
o Courtesy and communication
o Satisfaction
All of these help to build up the picture of how to form the best relationships and retain these customers.
Most contact centres monitor their own statistics such as;
• Average hold times
• Average call duration
• Percentage of dropped calls
• Percentage downtime
• Calls per agent / desk handled
But how do you know how that compares with the rest of your industry or to other operations of similar size and structure.
MARKETii’s internal statistics benchmark will allow you to compare these important factors against those of your peers so you can assess your performance and make educated decisions on your services.
You will be able to view the best / worst scores (see results, not which company ) within certain KPI’s that provide centre managers the ability to utilise their services and capabilities in the best way and learn best practice.
Apart from seeing where your services sit amongst your peers, you can also learn from companies that have a similar size but from differing industries
Many companies have automated or manned brochure information request lines, store location lines, or special campaign lines. Existing customers and potential new ones call into these centres requesting information and materials. You all monitor how successful the campaigns are by way of sales, but how satisfied was the customer with the actual call into the centre at the beginning of the process. This will differentiate whether the potential customer would go to one of your stores and buy a product or due to poor service be reluctant to use the company and may use your competitor.
As most call centres obtain personal information on the customer, we at MARKETii contact a sample of the customers to assess their thoughts on the request lines and ask questions such as:
• How did they rate the automated system?
• Were they given or did they receive the information requested?
• How long did it take to arrive?
• Was the service helpful?
• Did they buy product from you?
• If not why not?
• Did they go on to buy a competitor product and why?
• Would they use the service again?
• What if anything can you improve upon?
By sampling a set of these customers you will be able to assess the success of your centre’s set up and make changes where necessary to the service, thus keeping all of your potential customers happy and encourage repeat custom.
When a company carries out a large ranging installation or implementation of new products or services, it can affect hundreds if not thousands of people.
How much follow up is done to assess what impact it will have on these staff or customers before, during and after the installation or implementation takes place.
Often driven from top down within a company, how much forethought goes into obtaining feedback from those involved so that lessons can be learnt along the way and help the process run more smoothly.
An example may be a new systems upgrade at a bank for e.g. 5,000 CD ROM updates sent out and need to be uplifted by branches and sub branches. By MARKETii contacting a sample of these branches the client can assess:
• Arrival time
• Was the implementation successful?
• Did you use the user manual, if so, which parts?
• Time taken for uplift?
• Has the implementation been tested? If not why not?
• Problems / issues?
• Re confirm personnel responsible?
These and many other factors and findings can then be analysed in real time to improve delivery and use of the new or improved services, in turn reducing downtime which equates to money.
Many companies and organisations across the globe use Mystery Shoppers to assess the level of service they are offering to their customers.
There are two advantages for using this process, firstly, by openly informing your employee’s that this process is in place to monitor service quality will encourage them to perform well. Secondly, with the results taken from the Mystery shop, you will have details about specific employees’ capabilities such as knowledge, technical skills, professionalism, customer service skills etc.
Marketii will help you understand what level of service your staff are producing to your customers. Our experienced team will be thoroughly briefed before interacting with your staff as real customers!
By having this knowledge Marketii is giving you the opportunity to address specific issues and also gives you the ability to share best practice across your employees. The findings will help you with your internal processes e.g. staff appraisals, by being able to give your employees SMART targets gathered from the data. You will also be able to identifying key strengths, weaknesses, trends, training needs, star performers etc.
In addition to receiving your own results on a confidential basis, by working with MARKETii you will also gain access to many industry standards and benchmarks.
There are a number of ways to look at this. One enables you to monitor your service delivery against those of your peers where we build a specific program to view and understand best/worst in class, shortfalls in service delivery and comparisons of your service elements against companies you consider your competitors. Participants are all aware of which companies are in the benchmark but obviously you cannot see into their individual data. The benchmarking gives you the mean, model, median figures, best/worst in class performance and many other vital statistics, all of which are illustrated in the benchmark against your own confidential results.
Another way is to view by your service type, (Helpdesk, Field service, Depot etc) against other companies also delivering the same type of service. This will illustrate where issues lie within the delivery and where you are not meeting customer expectations. You can also see what levels you need to achieve in areas of professionalism, communication, technical ability and where your customers overall satisfaction sits within other companies from which they purchase.
A combination of the above gives you highly significant industry information allowing you to review your services and satisfaction ratings not only against a group of your peers but also those in the same service delivery methodology.
Through such standards you have the tools to better understand how to increase your satisfaction levels, improve your customer retention and compete with your competitors.
Our service also includes an internal escalation process, which will essentially add value to your service quality instantly! As part of all our services, MARKETii offers a proven excellent system to escalate to the appropriate manager/team any conversation that may need immediate attention by the company.
It’s not only the reporting that is in real time. Our highly efficient escalation process alerts your specific managers worldwide within moments when we have feedback from a customer who is very unhappy or in need of urgent attention. This process is designed to enable you to contact and resolve issues with the customer, thus maintaining a high level of satisfaction and retention and before they start telling people about the service.
On a more positive note, our packages also allow us to escalate very satisfied customers or those indicating to purchase again / renew contracts, which can be used as motivational tools to managers and staff delivering the service as well as increasing sales.
Included in this process is the ability to send the actual call recording directly to the service manager enabling him/her to listen to the conversation and get the full picture before contacting the customer. This is all done within minutes of the survey taking place. We currently operate 4 types of escalation;
Negative Feedback Escalation
Our Customer Service Representative (CSR) regards the customer is in need of further attention or the customer has requested further urgent attention, often to do with the service they received. The customer may not have rated a question with a 1 out of 5.
Poor Score Escalation
The system automatically escalates the issue as the customer has given a 1 out of 5 a poor rating for one or more of the closed rated questions, such as a 1 out of 5 for technical ability. Where the customer may have given more than one question with a 1 rating this is only escalated once within the system.
Lead Escalation
Our Customer Service Representative (CSR) regards the customer is in need of further attention or the customer has requested further attention, this time to do with possible sales leads or renewal of contracts / warranties etc.
All 5’s Escalation
The system automatically escalates the issue as the customer has given top ratings (5’s) for all questions.
MARKETii has a fully interactive web based reporting area for their clients, Developed in conjunction with it’s clients, the reporting provides companies with real-time information enabling users to assess and monitor their service quality at any time from anywhere.
Triple encrypted security provides users and clients with peace of mind knowing that the site is secure
Standard reporting includes the following and available in English and native language;
• Standard graphical and tabular illustrations of rated and coded questions
• Internal and external benchmarking
• Best in Class
• Drill down levels to product / customer / region etc
• Portfolio analysis – customer importance and improvement
• Net Promoter scores
• Results spread and cultural anomalies
• Acceptable service times
• Escalation tracking – positive, negative and sales leads
• KPI’s
• Export graphs, tables and raw data to pdf, Excel, XML
With MARKETii’s internal IT team we work with clients to tailor their requirements ensuring the deliverables are timely, statistically accurate and useable to make informed business decisions.
MARKETii is centrally based in London to ensure a full range of native language staff with strong English as a second-language. There are over 200 languages spoken in London so we can provide coverage for all markets
MARKETii employs all its own Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s) as we believe that to get the best from your staff you need to provide them with the security, flexibility and continuity.
All our staff go through rigorous training to ensure their competence in performing customer surveys. The use of empathy coupled with good probing skills and clear understanding of the client’s services help the collection of the right type of data and responses.
As many pan World wide and regional reports are requested in English it is key that our CSR’s have strong translation capabilities to allow full and meaningful reporting of results.
We currently work in the following languages:
Arabic, Bulgarian, English, Czech, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Malay, Mandarin, Norwegian, Portuguese (and Brazilian Portuguese), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, Turkish,
Based on regional needs, MARKETii assigns multi-language interviewers so that customer language preferences can be met in the midst of a customer call. For example, interviewers performing calls to Switzerland speak German, French and Italian because the customer may speak any one or more of these languages.
Please note that we also carry out web based surveys in native language.
MARKETii monitor and review 100% of the completed survey, enabling clients to be confident in the results and be able to fully analyse the conversations. As a project of this type would be undertaken in many languages it is important that our CSR’s are well versed in English as well as their native language. All CSR’s undergo testing and ongoing appraisals during their time with MARKETii
Within the quality checks not only are we reviewing spelling, punctuation and grammar within the narrative, but also the number scaled questions to assess that the responses match those of the narrative.
Our quality teams also continuously appraise the work of our CSR’s to ensure the continuity of high quality work. We also use our Senior CSR’s to cross reference work in native language to ensure full customer responses are being detailed correctly before they are translated into English.
We openly encourage our clients to request from time to time samples of our calls. This not only ensures a high degree of professionalism on the CSR part, but also gives the client an interesting insight into the conversation that takes place and the customers reactions to a variety of question areas.
MARKETii asks its clients to indicate the number of days to wait between surveys with the same customer should their name re-appear on the contact list.
Keeping in mind that the perceived time for this survey is between 2-4 minutes, customers may be uncomfortable about being contacted twice within a 60 or 90 day period. Most MARKETii clients opt for a 90-day period between contacts; the decision is down to client discretion.
The regular MARKETii process maintains a historical “Fatigue-list” with customers that have been recently contacted. During the conversion of the customer data transmitted by clients, the names of individuals that appear on the “Fatigue-list” are deleted from the data list, and the random selection is pulled from the remaining data. Customer data in the “Fatigue-list” are typically tracked by Contact Name + Company ID.
Other special situations may be handled within the “Fatigue-list”. For example, certain corporations, service locations, or individuals may be marked for eternal exclusion from possible selection.
MARKETii has many years experience of close working relationships with a range of consultants based upon the requirements of its clients.
Using our services not only brings on board expert intelligence to assess the results but also adds consistency as the consultants are very familiar with the entire processes and reports.
Areas of expertise lie in:
- Change management
- Full in-depth statistical analysis
- Operational audits and assessment
- Implementing balanced score card
- Staff development
- Business process re-engineering
- Maintaining competitive edge
- Geographic consulting – specialising geographic areas and in cultural differences for better understanding of issues within particular regions
As programs are developed then the requirements are tailored to meet with not only the client needs but their ability to adapt and change processes through time. We report back on where the key issues lie, investigate, analyse and finally recommend. Once a process has been improved or changed, we continue to monitor it to ensure increased performance, in addition to focusing out attention to the next challenge.