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Service Optimisation
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The customer typically demands service. Unlike marketing and sales, it's thus not the company that's seeking contact with the customer, but the customer who's proactively contacting the company. At the same time, service contact is one of the strongest levers in terms of customer retention, and therefore offers enormous potential.
Checking the Quality of Contact
An ever-greater proportion of contact with the customer takes place on the phone. Countless surveys unfortunately demonstrate
that long waiting times, being frequently passed on, plus incompetent or outright false information are too often the norm with
quite a few call centres.
This makes it all the more vital for companies to give their own call centre a regular health check, and that means both inbound as well as outbound calls. Furthermore, the quality of contact when it comes to letters, e-mails, and shops should of course be subjected to regular checks.
Targeted Use of Methods
Vocatus typically uses three different methods for a quality check on a call centre. In the case of an event-driven customer
survey, the customer is phoned shortly after their contact with the call centre and asked how satisfied they were with the call.
It is thus possible to subjectively rate the quality of service from the customer's perspective.
With call monitoring, the call centre agent is observed in the real-life situation, with an experienced market researcher listening in to the conversations and rating them in accordance with operationalised criteria. The staff member's behaviour can thus be precisely measured using objective yardsticks.
Finally, when it comes to mystery calling, experienced test callers rate the behaviour of the staff member at the call centre on the basis of several standardised test cases. In addition to the objectivisation of the assessment of the content, the advantage of this method chiefly lies in the fact that competitors' call centres can also be tested, thereby making benchmark comparisons possible too.
In doing so, we check both subjective criteria (such as how friendly the agent is) as well as objective criteria such as the waiting time until the call is answered or the 'once-and-done' rate. Comparable methods are used so as to include making contact via letter, e-mail, or fax in the survey.
Checking of Correctness and Completeness
When checking the quality of contact of phone calls or written communication, we above all also check to see whether the answer
the customer received was actually correct and complete.
Checking correctness frequently shows that a frighteningly high percentage of all answers were incorrect or incomplete. This either generates further calls or letters on the part of the customer, or they drift off in frustration to the competition.
Optimisation of Service Level Agreements
In addition to checking service levels, Vocatus also supports you in setting out the service levels to be agreed. We use the
impact of the various parameters of Service Level Agreements upon customer satisfaction and customer retention to ascertain
which service levels are really important. Agreements can thus generally be reduced to a few relevant parameters.
This means staff in call centres can concentrate on what's truly important, and the regular checking of the quality of service also only has to deal with relevant questions. In the case of external service providers, adherence to service levels can directly influence the payment of the service provider via a bonus system.
Supplementary methods
In addition to purely checking the quality of service, comparable methods can of course also be used to check the staff's
sales orientation.
Furthermore, it’s often advisable to supplement these tried and tested methods with ones that include the "parties concerned"
in person. For example, by involving regular customers as "Service Scouts" who provide ongoing reports about service quality
from their own perspective. Another option might be intensive, market research-aided workshops with management or employees in
call centres. They can help to uncover previously hidden contradictions in working procedures, inefficiencies within internal
processes, and the causes of problems.