The telecommunications industry is taking the social media revolution to heart and boosting the use of social channels at contact centers across the world in order to enhance customer engagement and service, a new survey has found. The results come from a telephone survey of more than 100 customer service managers conducted by cloud-based customer care service provider LogMeIn and market research firm Ovum (News - Alert) during last December and January. Survey respondents included telecommunications, retail, government, educational and technology companies based in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
The survey questioned the customer service managers about the measurements they relied upon to judge effective contact center performance, including any solutions used to gauge customer satisfaction or forward-looking infrastructure spending plans. Respondents told LogMeIn (News - Alert) and Ovum that customer satisfaction metrics were increasingly replacing conventional metrics including average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR), as the more appreciated standards of contact center success.
"A couple years ago, virtually every call center and help desk team would ask us to show them how our products could help them control costs and become more efficient. These days, those same people and organizations want to know one thing: Can your products help us increase customer satisfaction?" said Lee Weiner, LogMeIn's VP of Support Products in a statement announcing the results. "This data reinforces what we believe to be a positive and rather remarkable shift in strategy that favors both businesses and consumers – an acknowledgement of the growing power of customer referrals."
The study found that 90 percent of contact centers employ customer satisfaction metrics to judge contact center effectiveness, and 62 percent identified customer satisfaction as the primary success measurement for their contact center operations. This placed customer satisfaction well ahead of average handle time and first call resolution as the measure of success. The respondents indicated that more contact centers were adopting customer satisfaction as their primary success metric, with 73 percent of respondents saying that customer satisfaction would be the primary metric within three years. Almost 70 percent of survey respondents said that social media enhancements, including live chat and social media, were being deployed at their contact centers to increase customer care.
As customer satisfaction rises as the primary means of assessing effective contact center performance, companies are also developing tools to evaluate customer satisfaction better. 69 percent of respondents indicated that their firms already attempt to measure or will soon measure the financial results of increased customer satisfaction. Among companies already assessing the financial impact of customer service, 30 percent of respondents cited Net Promoter Score (NPS), an industry standard metric, as the basis for adopting product or service.
"Today's operators and device OEMs are increasingly looking at customer experience as a means of differentiation, and we believe this is changing the way they engage with their customers, from pre-sale service to post-sale support," said Aphrodite Brinsmead, Customer Interaction Analyst at Ovum in the release. "The data suggests that this customer-centric approach will become more prevalent over the next few years, as companies invest in analytics and mobile applications in order to improve service across all devices and touch points."
Edited by Rich Steeves