Use Enterprise Feedback Management as a Customer Retention Tool

By Confirmit’s Gary Schwartz

Several years ago, while selling software into the British telecoms market, I met the CMO of a smallish network operator. He described the issues facing his business, and when I asked him his churn rate, he replied, almost casually, that it was “about normal for our industry: 37 percent.” He must have seen my jaw drop, as he quickly retreated from the blasé nature of his disclosure. His brutal honesty gave a young salesperson stark insight into the industry’s attitude toward its customer base.

This attitude isn’t restricted to network operators: I recently met with a member of the retail board of a major financial services institution who told me that the board has only just begun to consider customer retention as a key strategic issue.

Given the current state of the global economy and the risk that customers might defect to the sidelines rather than to the competition, it seems obvious that retention strategies should be at the forefront of any business that has a direct relationship with its customers.

Where to start? With the business line that has the most direct contact with customers and can create the most emotive customer experiences: the call center.

Many service providers view their call centers as cost centers rather than revenue generators. As a result, management tends to search for ways to maximize efficiencies, generally expressed as utilization of agents, number of calls handled, and average call duration. Call center software reports on these and other metrics.

These metrics, however, typically measure what is important to the company, and not necessarily to the customer.

First call resolution (FCR) is the metric that has always confounded me. In most call centers, the agent determines whether FCR is achieved on each call, and therefore, how management measures whether a problem has been resolved! Nor do I understand how call centers typically achieve over 80 percent first call resolution (according to Dimensions Data’s global call center benchmark surveys).

Those numbers don’t resonate with my experience as a consumer (with a few notable exceptions), nor with those of my colleagues, friends, and family.

Companies can use an Enterprise Feedback Management program to solicit customer feedback to measure and improve call center performance. The ideal program measures each customer’s experience within 24 hours of a customer’s interaction with the business. Such a key moment of truth might be contacting the call center to add or change a service or to resolve a billing question.

As the feedback relates to a specific, recent event, the customer’s experience is fresh in mind. Invitations to provide feedback can be personalized so that customers understand their context. Personalization and event-driven outreach results in an increased response rate and more accurate data.

Management can use dashboard reporting to track aggregate customer attitude over time. Given that changes in attitude precede changes in behavior, businesses that implement such a program have the tools to anticipate customer actions and change business processes before customers leave.

In the current economic environment, in which customers are more likely to make decisions based on price and might even choose to drop certain services, forewarned is forearmed. If only the CMO I met years ago had chosen to understand his customer churn rate rather than merely accept it.

Gary Schwartz serves as senior vice president of marketing at Confirmit. He develops applications of Confirmit’s online survey, analysis and reporting platform and drives product development. His extensive experience with CRM includes roles with Informative, an MR software vendor, and product marketing roles at Microstrategy, a leading BI software vendor.

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