Customer Satisfaction: Lessons from the high street

Tags: Customer Satisfaction

I was down in my native Newcastle over the weekend and took a trip to the Metrocentre, a shopping mecca that can serve 150,000 visitors a day and which I had not been to for many years. It struck me as I was wondering round the variety of stores how many were now offering loyalty based initiatives in an attempt to keep my business.  It got me thinking that in today’s highly competitive market, the importance of customer satisfaction really cannot be understated.  With such a diverse range of products, offers and competing price points, businesses need to ensure that their customers remain loyal and have a clear affinity to their brand. This is an increasingly difficult task for businesses, as like many others I was using my latest smart phone application to find me the best offers available. The massive growth of social media also provides a dissatisfied consumer with the ability to notify a mass audience within minutes.

As such, customer satisfaction needs to be a continuous improvement initiative, accurately measured and managed across the people, process and technology spectrums with a clear insight strategy.  A typical consumer, regardless of sector, wants an answer to their query in an effective manner, whilst utilising the contact channel of their choice - first time!  The only way this can be achieved is by providing an engaged and knowledgeable workforce underpinned with effective enabling technologies and LEAN processing disciplines.  A point made clear to me as I watched a saleswoman on Saturday lose a fairly significant amount of business by not having the knowledge about the product, unable to access systems to help her and watching helplessly as the customer wandered across to a competitor across the mall.

Whilst this was a premise based transaction, the same is equally true when it comes to contact centre interactions.  If you don’t meet your customer’s satisfaction first time the likelihood is that they will either look elsewhere or start to think about other options. To continually improve satisfaction, ongoing programs of activity need to be implemented looking at channel, transaction and service measures in a holistic fashion.  

This can be achieved via the use of post interaction surveys (based on customers method of contact) rating specific elements of the product, service and experience as well as utilising technologies such as speech analysis to identify levels of dissatisfaction, through items such as silent time, talkover or key word / phrase spotting.  Taken with additional insight from advisor dispositions a true picture of satisfaction levels can be obtained.  At RESPONSE this is something we undertake regularly as part of our continuous improvement initiatives and have introduced numerous activities to drive satisfaction on a first time basis.  This can be as ‘simple’ as providing our employees with the right tools and information, to implementing greater self serve abilities for our clients customers.  I admit it is an odd one for a contact centre to promote but the facts are that this is what a specific segment of the customer base wants. 

By consistently improving and refining the service based upon customer feedback, an organisation has a competitive edge and can drive customer loyalty.  My experience in Newcastle was not unique and would be repeated across the country. Those that were satisfying the customer through product, information and superior customer satisfaction are reaping the rewards against those that don’t and have to offer the next closing down sale, or watch as their customers simply go to their competitors instead.

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