Call Center Management Featured Article
Verint Releases Annual Experience Index to Rank Companies on Customer Service Quality
While your contact center may track many performance metrics, it can be argued that the most important metric is the customer experience. Sure, it’s not as easy to measure as average handle time, but it’s critical to get right. You need a way to ensure customers are encountering a positive customer experience in order to build both brand loyalty and affinity, successfully market your product or service and encourage customers to recommend your company to friends, families and coworkers, or even strangers in the case of positive reviews.
One of the best ways that businesses can improve their customer experience is by looking for best practices demonstrated by the companies that consistently rank at the top of quality lists. Each year, Verint (News - Alert) releases its Experience Index, which benchmarks the telephone-based contact center experience and traces its impact on the omnichannel customer journey. The latest Verint Experience Index benchmarks customer satisfaction with the contact center experiences of 25 leading brands in the banking, health insurance, property/casualty insurance, cable and telecom sectors. The index used a survey of 6,338 consumers to arrive at the rankings. The brands’ Net Promoter Scores were also factored into determination of the rankings.
The Index also uncovers key findings underscoring the impact of consumer contact-center satisfaction on the overall omnichannel customer journey, including the correlation between issue resolution and switch consideration/churn rates, increase in self-service and hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, and the connection between great experiences and the likelihood to recommend the brand.
Unsurprisingly, the Index found that fast and successful resolution of customer queries leads to the best customer experience.
“High call resolution is a central focus for brands aspiring to deliver quality customer service,” according to the index’s compilers. “Non-resolution rates, which range from 14 to 20 percent per sector, can result in an increased risk of customer defection. The research revealed that of those consumers who reported their issues were not resolved, nearly half would consider switching to a competitor.”
The index also examined the correlation between issue resolution rate and proclivity to churn in order to evaluate the proportion of respondents who would consider switching providers. The stakes were found to be highest in the cable industry, where 66 percent would consider a switch resulting in a churn rate of 13.2 percent.
So who came out on top? The Index ranked Allstate, Bank of America, Cox, Kaiser Permanente, and T-Mobile (News - Alert) in the top spots in their industries. Find the full report here (registration required).
Edited by Maurice Nagle