BPA Featured Article

Great customer service can turn your generally satisfied customers into true believers in your brand. Lousy customer experiences can get them running for the exits. And acceptable customer service can provide your interest groups with what they need without much friction.

But which of the above experiences does your business deliver?

Studies show that most businesses believe they’re delivering better experiences than their customers think they’re delivering. And that’s not good news, because businesses that don’t have a good handle on what they’re doing have a harder time improving and growing.

That’s why many businesses monitor their agent-cutomer contact center interactions. And it’s why organizations survey customers.

But the ability of businesses to survey their customers and get a real idea of their experiences is limited. Most customers don’t want to take the time and effort to participate in surveys. And surveys may misrepresent customer views because survey participants tend to be either very happy customers or those customers with an ax to grind.

Monitoring solutions – particularly those that employ natural language processing, and have the ability to understand and allow call center managers to act on key words and phrases in real time – can go a long way toward helping businesses know their agents and their customers, and improve their people and processes.

But before deploying any kind of monitoring solution, businesses need to define their quality assurance goals. And they should pinpoint what metrics align with and apply to those goals.

They should also do benchmarking – so they have hard data about where they are in terms of performance at the onset of their QA exercise. They should also benchmark against others in their industry vertical. Partnering with a third party is the ideal approach for benchmarking, to allow for more objective assessments.