Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Management: ForSee Determines Quality of Contact Center Customer Experience
Contact center experiences from calls, to email support to live chat are crucial to a company’s reputation, brand loyalty, and future sales. Most callers to customer service call to pay a bill or complain about something, and often find themselves in a haze of confusion at something breaking or not going right.
ForeSee recently released its February Contact Center Benchmark, which allows companies to determine how the contact center experience they provide compares to industry averages and customer expectations. The ForeSee Contact Center benchmark includes customer satisfaction scores for both sales and services contact centers at companies like JEA, Bodybuilding.com, Nikon, House of Fraser, and Eddie Bauer.
Nearly 11,000 customers expressed their opinions about contact centers to ForeSee in the month of February. The satisfaction benchmark for contact centers is at an average score of 70 on the company's 100-point scale. Companies scoring significantly higher than 70 are outperforming the industry average. Companies scoring significantly below 70 have a lot of work to do, because their customers' satisfaction has a direct impact on future actions. Scores for individual companies included in the benchmark range from a low of 53 to a high of 86, which is a large range that has implications for the future of their customer relationships.
"While measuring customer satisfaction with contact center experiences isn't a new trend by any means, we're happy to extend our methodology to this channel for companies who have been looking for a solid, technology-oriented customer experience solution," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee, in a press release."We work with hundreds of companies online who now understand how important it is to measure satisfaction at every touch point, contact centers included, throughout the company.”
ForeSee's technology is the ultimate predictor of customers' future behaviors and is a tool that pinpoints critical trouble spots for clients. It has been demonstrated over and over again that companies that improve their customer satisfaction scores improve their sales, loyalty, and recommendations. As part of its benchmark research, ForeSee compared the likely future behaviors of highly-satisfied customers with a satisfaction score of 80 or higher on the 100-point scale to those of less-satisfied customers (with satisfaction below 70). This comparison demonstrates the impact customer satisfaction with contact center experiences can have on a company's future success.
When it comes to contacting the contact center again, 174 percent of customers are more likely than less satisfied customers, which means a higher frequency of interaction, improved engagement, and increased share of mind and wallet. 154 percent of customers are more likely to purchase next time, which means increased sales, while 238 percent more likely to recommend the company to a friend, family member or colleague, which means more business and increased loyalty.
Eric Head, senior director overseeing ForeSee's call center business, said in a statement, "Contact centers are no exception, and it's imperative, if companies want to continue to grow their bottom line, to measure and address customers' experiences with contact centers via phone as well as email and chat."
Edited by Jamie Epstein