Do you work in the contact centre or call center industry? Are you looking for ways and means to improve your CSAT or Customer Experience scores?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then this article is meant for you, as I will share with you the 4 crucial building blocks on how to improve customer satisfaction.

Hint: It’s not just about Empathy and Rapport. If you do any sort of customer service, then it is assumed that you are already doing proper Empathy and Rapport. The strategies I’m about to share with you extend beyond that.

For over 10 years, I have used these strategies with great success, regardless of whether your service center is in-house, or a BPO.

My objective in sharing this is to help make this world a better place. Imagine a world where everywhere you go or anyone you speak to, you’ll be treated with excellent customer experience.

I hope that this article would bring value to you as a reader, and that you implement some of the best practices indicated below, as applicable to your organization, so that you, your children, and the next generations can experience a world filled with great customer experience.

From my experience doing process improvement and consulting in the customer service space, whether captive or outsourced, the post above from Daniel Ord summarizes it so well, I couldn’t think of anything else to add.

What I could do though, is expound on each item, and talk about it in detail based on my own personal experience.

Here goes…

The 4 Building Blocks for Improving Customer Satisfaction

1. Establish the right success measures
2. Implement a training and coaching system
3. Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement
4. Establish a Customer Feedback Mechanism

If you want me to expound on each item, then read on.

1. Establish the right success measures

“We’ll measure you on the right things so you can focus on producing great conversations”

Let me give you a specific example.

In Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, there was study done in an insurance company that covers doctors for cases regarding medical malpractice. The purpose of the study was to find out the likelihood of each doctor to get sued.

A common approach that you would normally do is to check the training and credentials of each doctor and analyze historical data to see how many errors they’ve made over the past few years, would you agree?

However, a better approach that was taken was to listen to brief snippets of discussions between the doctors and their patients, quite similar to how you would do call listening in a contact centre environment. The results were mind-blowing.

It was found that patients don’t really file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by bad medical practices, especially so if it’s a doctor that they like. The reason that they sue is because of bad medical practices and something else happens to them – something to do with bad conversation behavior.

The bad conversation behaviors they felt were when the doctors were:

• Rushing you
• Ignoring, disregarding, or not listening to you
• Talking down on you, or not treating you with respect

Apparently, the worst behavior that a doctor could ever do is establish dominance over the patient.

These exact same behaviors apply to a customer support environment, and any other conversation for that matter.

That being said, if you look at the other side of the spectrum, good conversation behaviors were also identified. Visits to the most liked doctors usually went like:

• The doctor would start by setting expectations with the patient e.g. “First I will examine you, then we will talk about your ailment, the possible solution/s, and then I will leave time for you to ask any questions.”
• They also are good at active listening e.g. “Go on, tell me more more about that…”
• They are very positive to be around with – they laugh and tend to be funny

Now if you want to take this approach to the next level, you can utilize the Kano model.

On this diagram, you’ll see 3 lines:

1. Basic Needs – these are the most basic expectations of your customer, such that if you fail to provide these, you’ll get immediate customer dissatisfaction. In our doctor example, that would be having the bad conversation behaviors.
2. Performance needs – these are usually the things that differentiate you from the others, and make your customers like you over your competitors. The more of this you do, the greater the customer satisfaction. In our doctor example, we can say that it would be the good conversation behaviors of the most liked doctors.
3. Delighters – these are the things that would “wow” your customers. But what differentiates a delighter from a performance need is that if you fail to provide a delighter, it has no negative implication on the customer.

To give you an example, I brought my wife to see the doctor recently due to asthma attacks. He’s one of our favorite doctors as he exhibits all the proper behaviors that I’ve mentioned earlier.

But the “wow” factor that he provided was when he gave my wife a free inhaler, went on the explain the advantages over her previous inhaler, and even demonstrated how best to use it.

It was completely unexpected, though he mentioned it was just stock that was given to him by a medical representative, and was going to expire in the next 4 months. But nonetheless, it would have cost us more than the consultation fee if we were to purchase that.

As an additional “wow” factor, he even provided a spacer for the inhaler, to ensure my wife gets the most effective intake of the medication.

Had he not provided these freebies, he would still have been one of our favorite doctors. But what he did was definitely a delighter for us.

To sum things up:

• Identify Dissatisfiers and do less of those or eliminate them completely
• Identify Satisfiers, find out how you can replicate and do more of those
• Listen to your top performers to identify Delighters, and share those best practices to everyone

Ultimately, it’s all about a changing your mindset. Instead of having a transactional relationship with your customers, how do you turn it into a transformational relationship that will make a significant impact to their life because you made a difference?

2. Implement a training and coaching system

“We’ll help you through ongoing training and coaching to keep you sharp”

First of all, I firmly believe that one key to making this successful is that your supervisors, trainers, and coaches should be the top performing people when it comes to CSAT. Why? Because they should be able to set an example, and be a role model for their people as to how to give great customer experience. Dan Lok talks about this to a great extent.

For example, if a customer service representative is not performing as expected, the supervisor can pinpoint what works and what doesn’t, and show the right way of doing things.

e.g. “The line you used here can still be improved. Try saying this instead…” or “At this portion of the conversation, your tonality was like this. Try increasing your tonality when you say this phrase…”

Second, your training should be targeted. I understand that there are processes that everyone should adhere to, such as call flows, policies and procedures, standard working instructions, scripts, disclaimers, regulatory requirements, etc. Those are all process-related and I get that. But that’s not what I mean when I talk about targeted training.

What I mean by targeted training is to identify the competencies and opportunities of individuals or groups of individuals, and help them be better at what they do by providing them with specific action plans that target their greatest opportunity area.

Yes, area, not areas. They key is to not confuse them with so many action plans. As James Schramko would say, it’s not about how much stuff you implement, it’s all about results.

He goes on to say that you should think about what you can do to remove distractions, and allow them to deliver a great result with the least amount of things.

Implement less stuff, increase your frequency of contact, and your people will get significantly better results.

There are a number of ways by which you can segregate the population, and do a further deep-dive analysis. Some examples based on what I’ve done in the past are by:

• Performance buckets (top, middle, bottom, or by quartiles, or another option can be consistently meeting or exceeding the goal, close to achieving the goal, far from goal)
• Skillset / complexity
• Call arrival pattern by time in the day, day of the week, week of the month, etc. (I’ve found that some people tend to be inconsistent at maintaining the proper behaviors that drive good CSAT)
• Shift buckets
• Teams or Supervisors
• Tenure
• Background (in one study I did I’ve found that those that do not have call center experience but have a background in nursing or care giving tend to do well)
• Behaviors (empathy, tonality, knowledge, use of scripts, compliance to action plans, good and bad conversation behaviors as indicated above)

Third, coaching should be a positive experience. Managers would usually say praise your people in public, and give feedback for course-correction in private.

I would argue that there’s a more effective way of doing this. You must praise the positive behavior that we want to reinforce by catching them when they’re doing something good. This is a strategy used by the best coaches in the world, and is probably one of the best ways to build self-confidence in every individual within your team.

Here’s a video that talks about how effective coaching builds self-confidence for your coachees.

Lastly, when it comes to coaching, the best implementation in my experience was where people are coached on behaviors, rather than on numbers.

For example, when you are doing call listening to see how an agent is performing, the usual output is a filled-out audit checklist with a score based on how many items the agent was able to comply to on that checklist. That is usually turned into a % percentage score and will be the basis of the agent’s performance for that specific call.

Instead of that, the most effective approach based on my experience is to evaluate what behavior the agent needs to be coached on, and have them focus on improving that one single behavior that is common across all of his calls.

The behaviors you want may differ from one industry to another, but a great starting point, if you haven’t determined any yet, would be the good and bad conversation behaviors that we’ve talked about above in #1. Establish the right success measures.

3. Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Ultimately, the goal should be to achieve Zero Call Resolution. What that means is customers don’t have to reach out to you in order to get their problems resolved. Though that concept is beyond the scope of this article, you can let me know in the comments below if you’d want me to write a separate article regarding that.
Meanwhile, this article focuses on what you can do from within the contact center team.

“We’ll fix problems so you don’t have to deal with the same issues over and over”

Getting from “Problem” to “Solution” isn’t as straightforward as it seems. But in its most basic form, you need:

1. A “Problem Identification” platform
2. An “Idea Generation” platform to solve these problem

The Problem Identification platform can come in different forms. One example is an Employee Feedback channel. But for this to be effective, it has to be focused on process-related issues.

Once a problem is logged, other employees who experience the same thing can “up-vote” problems, so the most painful ones come out on top.

Another example of a Problem Identification platform is a Risk and Issue log, where people take note of Risks (potential problems) and Issues (current problems) as you encounter them.

These are tracked over time and action plans must be put in place, especially for those that occur the most often.

Speaking of action plans, that’s where the Idea Generation platform comes into play. This is where employees become engaged and are empowered to submit solutions to the problems.

This is most effective when the solutions are created in the mindset of how you can solve the problem not once, but forever.

To ensure sustainability, all these effective solutions are logged in a Control Plan, where you will have preventive and corrective actions.

• Preventive actions are the things you do to ensure that the problem does not occur again
• Corrective actions are the steps you take in case the problem still occurs

Sometimes, there needs to be a bridge between what’s identified in the list of problems, and how to get to a solution. Because in certain cases, the solutions aren’t that obvious. Or sometimes, no matter what solution you implement, it just won’t work.

That’s where you need to do Root Cause Analysis, where Lean Six Sigma can be utilized to great effect.

That’s a whole new topic entirely. I have spent years practicing and honing this craft that it’s just not possible to write about it in one single article. But you can always read up on Value Stream Mapping, identifying the different types of waste, root cause analysis tools, the DMAIC approach, etc. to see what’s applicable in your organization.

Though if you’d like to learn Lean Six Sigma and even get certified, then head over to our courses page for details.

4. Establish a Customer Feedback Mechanism

“We’ll stay in constant contact with our customers – because their needs and wants change – we’ll have to adapt too. And when we adapt we’ll not just tell you how, we’ll tell you why.”

Most mature call centers already have this in place, in the form of a Customer Survey. Though the method and frequency may differ between companies or industries, what’s important is that we get to solicit feedback from our customers to check if we did well, and get it on a per call and per agent level.

Ideally you’d want to be able to capture feedback from the customer such as:

• How was their customer experience?
• Was their concern resolved?
• What behaviors specific to the agent that assisted them did the like or dislike?
• Free-form verbatim expressing details of their experience

But of course what matters is what you do with this data to help improve the business as a whole, as well as help the agent that assisted the customer become a better performer.

Though you can do call listening to find out what works and what doesn’t based on the survey responses, you’ll be very limited in coming up with high-impact solutions unless you do some additional analysis.

Good analysts can take that data and do some number-crunching to find out what behaviors drive good CSAT. And with a little more effort, do text analytics on the customer verbatim to find trends, opportunities, best practices, etc.

They can also help you create a bridge plans and a glidepath analysis using regression to forecast when you can possibly hit your goals depending on what interventions you put in place, and even find out at what point their performance will potentially plateau, unless you do something different.

These types of analysis are out of scope of this article but if you’d like to learn how to analyze through data science, then head over to our courses page for details.

Conclusion

Daniel Ord said it best

“We’re in the business of producing conversations. That’s what we ‘make’ here. So let’s focus on producing the best conversations ever.”

References:

1. Daniel Ord
2. Dan Lok
3. James Schramko
4. Malcolm Gladwell

I hope you found this article to be of great value, and that you learned something you can implement straight away.

Now there’s an entire science behind this. So if you want to learn Lean Six Sigma, be Certified, and take your career to the next level, then head over to https://robbieagustin.com/courses and enroll today.

Or at the very least, if you haven’t yet, download your FREE (for a limited time only) eBook – The Business Optimization Blueprint, where I show you a straightforward 5-Step Process how to transform your business and take it to the next level.