The first step to improving your Customer Service call centre is by measuring its performance. How? For a long time, companies have focused on traditional activity and productivity indicators; pick-up rate, average time before pick-up, average call duration, etc. These KPIs are no longer enough. Customer Service performance is increasingly measured by the quality of...
The first step to improving your Customer Service call centre is by measuring its performance. How? For a long time, companies have focused on traditional activity and productivity indicators; pick-up rate, average time before pick-up, average call duration, etc. These KPIs are no longer enough.
Customer Service performance is increasingly measured by the quality of service provided to customers. A good call centre is one that satisfies a company’s customers. One way to assess call centre satisfaction (and also agent satisfaction), is to send out post-call surveys. We will expand upon this throughout the article.
Discover 10+ questions to include in your post-call surveys to measure the quality of your call centre and continuously improve it.
Why and how to improve service via your call centre
Consumers today are over-informed, and increasingly demanding of brands. They expect flawless service. Companies are now obliged to honour these expectations, or see their image tarnished by negative comments on social media, forums or other blogs.
Today, improving Customer Service requires not only optimising productivity, but first and foremost ensuring that the company always offers its customers satisfactory quality service. Most companies think that their Customer Service is impeccable. This is often far from the truth… Consumers are (very) frequently not satisfied.
We have already discussed at length the importance of customer satisfaction on this blog. Companies do not satisfy their customers simply to please them. Customer satisfaction has a proven, albeit complex, impact on loyalty, brand image, reputation and revenue. The quality of a call centre influences a company’s most important objectives. Behind customer satisfaction lies commercial performance. Improving Customer Service should therefore be a priority in any customer satisfaction strategy.
To improve your call centre, you must first measure how it is perceived by your customers. Develop voice of the customer tools and implement a feedback management system. Skeepers can help you achieve this with our smart survey solution.
Sending post-call surveys allows you to monitor in real time what your customers think of your Customer Service, and to identify good practices, enchantments and irritants. They also help define priority areas for improvement and develop your managers and agents’ skills. The idea is simple: to automatically send your customers a survey after each interaction with an agent.
Surveys are generally sent out by email. But it is also possible to send surveys via text message. Our clients obtain the best response rates through these two channels (email and SMS).
Sending post-call surveys also allows to trigger specific actions. For example, some companies automatically call their customers back if they express strong dissatisfaction in a survey. One of our clients, insurance company Amauiz, uses Skeepers to automatically send a satisfaction email following any interaction with their Customer Service. When a customer expresses dissatisfaction, a call back is automatically triggered in order to understand the reason(s). Surveys are used as tools to both measure and manage customer satisfaction.
Discover without further ado 10+ examples of questions to ask your customers following a call centre interaction.
10+ ready-to-use questions to ask customers to measure and improve your call centre’s performance
1- Did you easily find the phone number to reach our call centre?
Accessibility is an important customer expectation that strongly impacts their satisfaction. This first question is used to evaluate the accessibility of Customer Service and to find out, for example, if customers are able to easily locate the phone number.
2- How long did you have to wait before being connected to a call centre agent?
Everyone, at some point in their life, has had to contact customer service. What is the most annoying aspect of this? Most people would reply: the waiting time before pick-up. Customers do not like waiting, especially when they are contacting a hotline to solve a problem. Who has never experienced those long minutes of waiting for an agent to pick up, with the telephone to their ear and elevator music playing in the background? If you want to offer your customers impeccable Customer Service, you must therefore optimise the average waiting time before pick-up.
An alternative to this question could be: “How would you qualify the waiting time before speaking to an agent?” With the following answers: “Too long”, “A bit long”, “Normal”, “Fast”, “Very fast”.
Note that the average waiting time before pick-up is used for the NF 345 certification granted to call centres capable of answering at least 80% of calls in less than 1m30 .
3- How would you evaluate the average handle time of your request?
It is far more interesting to analyse the answers to this question than the renowned “average handle time” (AHT). AHT is a productivity indicator that is used less and less these days. However, when working towards optimising your quality of service, understanding the customer’s perception of the handle time is particularly interesting.
4- Was your problem solved?
The answers to this question allow to measure the efficiency of your Customer Service and the quality of handling of the call by your agent.
Discover the7 keys to offer the best customer service.
5- If yes, was your problem solved in one phone call?
If you wish to improve your call centre’s performance and quality, you should avoid customers having to call several times for the same reason. This question is a follow-up to the previous one, with the same objective: to measure the agents’ quality of customer care.
First call resolution is an important customer satisfaction factor. More and more companies use the first call resolution rate as a key indicator for this very reason, to monitor the efficiency of their Customer Service.
6- Would you recommend our Customer Service/company to your friends, family and colleagues?
If you follow this blog, you will immediately recognise this question as the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. In recent years, the NPS has become a star indicator and a Customer Relations Manager favourite. It allows to measure customer satisfaction indirectly, by calculating your customers’ likelihood to recommend you. The Net Promoter Score also helps identify your company’s critics and ambassadors. The NPS is absolutely relevant in a post-call survey.
To find out more about NPS, how to calculate it and use the results, discover the Complete guide to the Net Promoter Score.
7- Are you satisfied with the customer care you have received?
This question allows to measure your customers’ overall level of satisfaction following their interaction with your call centre. The answers to this question are: “Very satisfied”, “Satisfied”, “Neutral”, “Dissatisfied”, “Very dissatisfied”. You can calculate the CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score, from these answers. This is the second key indicator following the NPS.
Variants of this question can be asked to measure each aspect of the customer’s experience:
- Waiting time
- Greeting and listening
- Quality of handling
- Clarity
The CSAT can therefore serve as a model for questions 3, 4 and 5 in your post-call surveys.
8- On a scale of 1 to 5, what level of effort was required for your request to be handled?
The less effort a customer spends, the more loyal they are. According to the Harvard Business Review article that promoted the Customer Effort Score, 94% of customers who reported low effort during their interaction expressed their intention to re-purchase. A study by the Customer Contact Council demonstrated a correlation between effort and loyalty. It is therefore very interesting to measure “customer effort”.
An alternative to this question would be: “What level of effort was required to obtain an answer?”. The idea is basically the same. Either way, the purpose is to calculate the Customer Effort Score (CES), measure the effort spent by the customer to solve their problem and obtain what they wanted. The CES is a key indicator for measuring customer experience quality. A bad CES score should encourage you to simplify your process.
You can expand upon the answers given to the three questions above (NPS, CSAT, CES) with follow-up questions. For example, after the CES question, you could ask: “What, in your opinion, need to be improved?” or “What required the most effort?”. If you choose open-ended questions (without pre-defined answers), you will obtain verbatim responses. Although they are often time-consuming to analyse (except when using a semantic analysis tool), verbatim responses allow customers to express themselves freely. They complement indicators and enrich your customer knowledge.
Discover How to properly use open-ended questions.
9- How would you rate the agent who helped you?
Instead of evaluating your Customer Service as a whole, this question allows to assess the agent who took the call. It should be noted that any questions suggested in this article can also be used to evaluate agents.
10- Did the agent mention our SelfCare services (FAQ, virtual assistant, resource centre, forums, etc.)?
Selfcare tools can handle a large proportion of complaints and requests, more specifically the simplest and frequently recurring ones. Agents can therefore focus on more complex requests, with higher added value. Hence the benefit of developing these tools. They are also appreciated by customers, who tend to prefer solving problems themselves rather than making the effort to contact Customer Service.
It is in both the company and customer’s interest for agents to educate and promote any selfcare tools offered by the company. More and more companies are asking their agents to refer customers with simple requests to their selfcare tools.
This question allows to measure to what extent agents are communicating on these selfcare tools.
11- If yes, did these resources help you?
This follow-up question allows to assess the quality of the customer selfcare tools available: website, FAQ, virtual assistant, documentation, support community, etc.
Customer Service quality is increasingly based on the ability to fully satisfy customers. In recent years, customer-oriented indicators (NPS, CES, CSAT) have come to complete traditional call centre monitoring indicators. Surveys allow you to listen to your customers’ expectations, needs and comments. If you wish to improve your call centre for a better quality of service, we strongly encourage you to ask your customers for feedback.
In conclusion, we would like to stress the importance of sharing your survey results and, more generally, performance KPIs. These should not be reserved for managers and executives. Customer answers, KPIs (NPS, CES, etc.) and even customer verbatim responses serve as motivation and involvement tools for agents. They can measure the results of their hard work and identify areas to improve, good practices, strengths and weaknesses.
CX Management allows to create and deploy cross-channel surveys and to analyse the results. Targeted surveys allow to measure your Customer Service performance at every level: global, team, agent. The data collected via these surveys is fed into decision-making dashboards, which allow to monitor your different KPIs in real time.
These KPIs, based on customer answers, can be customised to meet your objectives and call centre challenges. Access to these dashboards can be shared with your managers and agents. They can be sorted by contact type (after-sales service, admin, sales, etc.), agent, team, etc.
Skeepers CX also allows you to share reports automatically by email, at a customised frequency, with the people of your choice. Thanks to these tools, you will be able to transform your post-contact surveys into tools to manage and motivate your teams.
