Improving Customer Experience While Defeating Customer Attrition

Enhancing customer experience is something call centers always strive for. An improved experience is likely to decrease levels of customer attrition, and with the economic climate still depressed, losing clients is something businesses cannot afford.

RightNow Technologies carried out a survey which found some 84 percent of British consumers would be willing to pay more if they believed they were receiving what was defined as "superior customer service," showing it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Of those who said they would be willing to pay more for an "excellent customer experience," 62 percent would be willing to pay 10 percent more, while 25 percent would spend 15 percent more.

These figures, including the fact that it costs more to attract a new client than retain an existing one, suggests there is both a serious customer service and financial imperative for call centers to enhance experience.

What Makes A Bad Customer Experience?

Good customer experience creates loyalty and will encourage clients to pay more for the service they receive is all well and good, but what do positive and negative experiences encompass?

A good experience not only requires the resolution to a query, but a personal service connected across a number of channels. And it can be the simplest of mistakes which lets these factors slide.

A study produced by Richard Webber, visiting professor in the Department of Geography, King's College London, revealed how even something as innocuous as misspelling a customer's name can have a significantly negative impact on both the above factors.

Customers are not only unlikely to be impressed by receiving correspondence where their name is incorrect, but wrong spellings can also create serious issues when it comes to integrating data from different sources.

Webber indentified three key areas where such an error can take place, including a call center agent keying in the name phonetically and reps typing too fast, making grammatical errors.

Further research by the Institute of Customer Service found that good call center experiences are often being marred by a company's poor web presence, which makes it difficult for customers to find the information they need.

Enhancing Customer Experience to Reduce Customer Attrition

Increasing the personalization of its service by using analytics to match customers to the correct call center agents is the method Assurant Solutions used to boost its customer retention when it noticed attrition levels were rising.

Cameron Hurst, Vice President of targeted solutions at the insurance provider, told 1 to 1 Magazine, "We were well managed, well run, and had a seasoned staff, but we were still struggling with turnover issues."

The company employed the help of analysts to determine the attributes that would help them better personalize their service, which led it to create the Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform.

Using information such as how persistent the customer was as well as the experience of the agent, connected the client with the representative best equipped to deal with their query.

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IBM acquired the software last year, stating at the time it was proven to "increase customer retention, increase sales yields and decrease agent attrition".

"Assurant Solutions has been using an analytics-based routing approach to increase call centre profitability and enhance the customer experience in its call centres for more than seven years, increasing retention revenue by 37 percent and sales revenue by 29 percent within the first year of implementation," said Assurant Solutions Vice President Mike Politz.

The system differs from others in that it does not just route the call to an agent based on their skill set and availability, but rather steers it towards the optimum rep to resolve the query and, importantly, provide a positive customer experience.