Two months ago, I tried to convince you that measuring the performance of your customer center was necessary and easy to do. In "¿Cuánto es lo suficientemente bueno?" I spoke about the process of benchmarking and what to do once you have the data from that process. I also mentioned that you should be careful what you measure; studies show that what is measured gets fixed. This month, I would like to tell you about the results of research that indicate what factors are most important with regard to customer satisfaction.

The Purdue Research Foundation, at Purdue University in the US, conducted a study to see what factors in a customer interaction influenced customer satisfaction, both positively and negatively. The results revealed that the factors ranked in order from highest impact were, the ability to receive a correct answer on the first call, proper handling of complaints, adherence to schedule, length of queue time, abandon rate and speed of answer. We will explore the first factor in this month's article.

It perhaps not surprising that the factor that affects satisfaction the most is the ability to get a question answered quickly, without having to make a series of phone calls. Whatever the reason for the call, the customer wants a correct answer, on the first contact. It is frustrating to have to wait for an answer or to have to call another number to resolve an issue. This "first and done" metric shows whether your agents are knowledgeable and can solve problems. The performance in this area also affects your profit margin. If your agents have to call back a customer or, worse, ask the customer to call another number, money has been wasted on that contact and more money will be spent on the subsequent contacts.
How much better is it to answer the question on the first call? A simple example will help to clarify the costs. Let us assume you have a small center with 30 agents and your calls last, on an average, one minute and thirty seconds. If your 'first and done' percentage is fifty percent, that is, half of your callers have to call back or call another number, the cost of those additional calls could be as much as 450,000 pesos per year. Simply by reducing the percentage of returned calls from 50% to 25% your company would be able to save 225,000 pesos per year. That is a very good addition to the 'bottom line' of any company.

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There are several ways to affect such a positive change in the ability to answer questions on the first contact. They include giving our customers a central contact point, proper training of your agents, access by those agents to the information that is needed by customers, and empowerment of your agents. If each of your departments, sales, accounting, and service has a different telephone number, you force your customer to try to understand the company's structure. It is much easier for the customer to have one point of contact and use technology, in the form of an interactive voice response (IVR) system, to help to navigate through your company's departments. The IVR system can give the customer options and even supply simple information, thus reducing the need for a live person to handle some of those calls. Once the IVR has assisted the customer to find the proper department, the call is transferred to the agents handling those calls.

If your agents are struggling to answer questions, and if they have to do a lot of research on questions, you should look at how the agents are trained and what information they are learning. I have found the best solution for this is good training when a new employee joins the company and continued training for agents, refreshing their knowledge and giving them new information that is important to customers. The topics of the training should be driven by the questions your customers are asking. You have reports on that, don't you? (see: "El oro escondido en la información de sus clientes").

This information from customer reports should also be used to gather the information that the agents use to do their work. This data does not need to be in an expensive knowledge management system. However, if you have many agents and they require a lot of complex information, you should investigate such a system. The information could be maintained in printed form; just remember to ensure the pages are current and accessible (not across the room).

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Finally, in order for your customers inquires to be answered on the first call, your agents should have the ability to solve the problems; they should be empowered. Limits should be set on what agents can do for customers, and a regular review of their decisions is required. For example, when working for a manufacturing company, we allowed the agents to give customers a free warranty service for a year. We educated them on when it was appropriate to do so and asked them to use their judgment. We kept records how much they gave to customers and we were surprised to find that they gave away less than the Supervisors. Agents work closely with customers; they know when it is appropriate to offer something to calm someone down or to make amends.

If you only concentrate on one factor to improve your contact center's performance, let it be answering your customers concerns on the first call. You will save money and increase customer satisfaction. In the coming months, we will look at other factors that influence customer satisfaction, and explore how these factors apply to contact centers in Latin America.