The Help Desk Software Blog

Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Your Contact Center – Part 1

“Call centers have become obsessed with customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, not all of them know how to measure it.” Greg Levin of the International Customer Management Institute made that assessment nearly three years ago and it just as true today.

How important is customer satisfaction to you? It should be key to gaining a competitive advantage and keeping it. Therefore, you must be able to measure customer satisfaction and identify satisfaction drivers that need attention.

While companies are attempting to cut costs they must still keep their customers happy or risk losing them.

Did you know:

• 96% of customers who have had a bad experience don’t report it and 91% of those don’t do business with you again
• Dissatisfied customers tell 10 or more others who will never do business with you
• It costs 5 times as much to recruit a new customer as it costs to keep an existing customer
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, but the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%

If customer satisfaction is so important, how can you ascertain the level of your customers’ satisfaction. ASK THEM. Yes, ask them directly. And ask them within minutes of their call or e-mail to you. Feedback collected immediately after an interaction event is 40% more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours (or later) after the event.

Current contact center software contains post-call survey tools to capture customer feedback and enable you to gain insight into customer perceptions. These automated surveys have far lower costs and faster turnaround times than any other method.

In my next post, I will give you some best practices for your follow-up surveys.