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Measuring the Customer Experience with Hosted Call Centers

Measuring the Customer Experience with Hosted Call Centers

August 03, 2011
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Customers tend to gauge their satisfaction with a company based on all interactions. Five positive interactions can quickly be tarnished by one negative experience, leaving a company scrambling to make up for lost ground. For those operating the call center on demand, the challenge can often be presented in the methods to try and measure the customer experience.


For a number of years, companies measured customer satisfaction by simply tracking a lack of complaints. If a customer doesn’t notify the company of a problem, they must be satisfied. The problem with this approach is that customers will often leave a company without notifying them of a problem. With the hosted call center, it should be easy to gauge the customer experience by simply asking the customer to provide feedback. The challenge may exist, however, in how the questions are asked.

According to this recent inContact blog, a customer experience could reflect finding exceptional marketing collateral, but interacting with a pushy sales person…loving a product for a while, and then struggling with the process of gaining the right support when a problem occurs. The call center on demand solutions provider suggests that the overall customer experience is a reflection of both negative and positive interactions. If this is true – how do you put a number on it?

Perhaps the best approach to measuring the customer experience with your call center on demand is to focus on satisfaction and loyalty. Satisfaction is captured by asking customers how satisfied they are with a specific product or service. This approach is devoid of emotion, however, and still leaves you vulnerable to customer churn.

When measuring loyalty, your call center on demand should ask questions about the customer’s likelihood of recommending your product or company to a friend or colleague. This approach not only measures satisfaction, but also loyalty. That loyalty is an indicator that the customer is likely to purchase from you again, while also encouraging others to do the same. Such a customer is believed to be unlikely to deflect to a competitor.

While satisfaction and loyalty are good measurement tools, they still fail to truly measure the overall customer experience during interactions with your call center on demand. Forrester Research’s (News - Alert) Customer Experience Index allows you to benchmark overall customer experience against competitors within your industry or in the broader market. The Index captures customer feedback on usefulness, ease of use and enjoyability.

How do you measure the customer experience with your call center on demand? Do you simply track customer activity, or do you capture the voice of the customer?


Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco



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