Last week Fifth Quadrant released the 2012 Australia & New Zealand Customer Service Industry Technology Report. In contrast to my beloved boss Dr Wallace, this is my favourite report, and next week my second favourite report will be released, Performance Management.

I wanted to pull out a couple of key stats relating to customer service and technology......

The top five planned technology investment areas (including purchases, upgrades and replacements) for contact centres in Australia for the next 12 months are:

1. Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) (35%)
2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) (34%)
3. Virtual Hold / Automated Call Back (33%)
4. Voice & data recording & quality monitoring tools (29%)
5. Workforce Management tools (29%).

In relation to technology, the top three challenges faced by contact centres in Australia in the last 12 months were:

1. Stability of systems (38%)
2. Technology lacking functionality (36%)
3. Budget restrictions on technology spend (28%).

The top three technology strategies for contact centres in Australia for the next 12 months are:

1. Implement new technology (27%)
2. Review future technology requirements (23%)
3. Upgrading existing technology (16%).

Personal highlight.....it is great to see virtual hold and automatic call back as a top three investment area. Our data shows that consumers love this technology. Who really wants to wait on hold anymore?

If you are interested in ordering this report please drop an email to Jules at jtrajkovski@fifthquadrant.com.au.

I believe that customer experience measurement is a key activity all organisations should be undertaking. Our latest contact centre benchmarking results reveal some very interesting findings regarding current customer experience research practices.

To my surprise, traditional data collection methods such as call back surveys still appear to be a favourite data collection method, this is followed by online. What was surprising is that the take up of IVR remains very low as just about every organisation that I am a customer of seems to be asking me to complete a survey at the end whilst in the call cue. I am secretly (well not anymore) happy about this as I am not the biggest fan of IVR. However I will caveat that in certain situations it is ideal and I would be more than happy to recommend IVR at the appropriate times. Personally I like to get into understanding the why’s and this tends to involve more detailed questioning which IVR is not suitable for.

The other interesting area covered in the benchmarking study is the measures organisations use to assess customer experience performance. Customer Sat is the favourite by far. One that caught my eye though was Customer Effort. This has been widely talked about in customer experience research circles yet only 9% of organisations currently use Customer Effort.

Now back onto my soap box. At Fifth Quadrant we are passionate about Emotion. Customers have an emotional response to an interaction and this emotional response is much more powerful than any level of satisfaction. However, only 10% of organisations currently use Emotion as a measure of customer experience. To change this is now my mission!!!

Last week Fifth Quadrant officially launched its Customer Service Industry Analyst Practice. Within this practice we have significantly expanded the range of Customer Service and Contact Centre Industry reports.

One of the first reports that will be published will be on the topic of Enterprise Feedback Management. Enterprise Feedback Management is defined as 'the process of systematically collecting, storing and using customer feedback data that covers all customer interaction channels at the customer level to enhance business objectives and overall profitability'.

What this study seeks to measure is the extent to which organisations currently embrace truly enterprise-wide customer feedback management practices. I have been out and about in Sydney over the last two weeks speaking to Senior Executives from across the Finance, Telco and Utility industries, responsible for customer feedback / satisfaction research in their organisation.

So far I haven't found one organisation that would be classified as having an Enterprise Feedback Management programme in place in line with the definition given above. What is evident is that across all of the organisations I have spoken to so far all are collecting some form of customer feedback data (a good start). However, many differences exist regarding the level of integration, coordination and general sharing of information across the business. In many cases the customer feedback studies sit within different business units and in many cases results are not shared across other parts of the organisation.

These are only preliminary results. Therefore I would really like to hear what you have to say. Fifth Quadrant is expanding the programme and is recruiting organisations to participate in this study. If you are interested in participating please drop me an email ckirby@fifthquaudrant.com.au. We will be happy to share a copy of the report when it is complete as a thank you.

"How do I improve my CSAT scores?" I saw this question on a conversation thread on LinkedIn. There was some great discussion that focussed more on the finer technicalities of conducting research. I won't bore you with the details but it made me think about a piece of work we have completed called 'The Ideal Customer Experience'. The theory being that if customer service operations can deliver this 'Ideal Customer Experience' then ipso facto (sorry that makes me sound like Kevin Rudd) CSAT scores will increase.

So what constitutes 'The Ideal Customer Experience'? Before exploring that let's start with defining what we mean by Customer Experience. There are many books, journal articles and industry leaders that argue their definition of Customer Experience, particularly around what should and shouldn’t be included within it. The Cambridge dictionary for example, defines it as;

'The way someone feels at all stages of doing business with a company or organisation'.

Typically, organisations view Customer Experience with a focus on rational responses to interactions (e.g. level of satisfaction, recommendation) whilst neglecting emotional responses.

Fifth Quadrant goes beyond the rational and defines Customer Experience as:

'A holistic assessment of the rational and emotional response of a customer to an interaction with an organisation. It should be seen as an all encompassing reflection of a customer's relationship and level of engagement with an organisation'.

Why is understanding Customer Experience so important?

Human behaviour dictates that we constantly assess and re-evaluate our relationships. When we do, we generally ask ourselves three key questions:

1. What do I think about it?
2. What do I feel about it?
3. How much effort do I have to put into it?

If Customer Experience is seen as the 'reflection of the relationship and level of engagement with an organisation', then it is critical for any organisation to understand what that level of engagement is and how their customers may be re-evaluating their relationships with them on an on-going basis.

By constantly measuring and understanding these factors an organisation is able to identify any existing problems that customers may encounter while trying to interact with them. Additionally it will help identify any potential pain points that may cause the customer to terminate their relationship in the future. Once these areas have been identified then the organisation has an opportunity to implement service improvement initiatives that lead to:

1. Significantly improved customer experience, value, engagement and loyalty
2. Increased revenue
3. Reduced costs
4. Increased profitability per customer.

We often get asked how this translates to front line staff behaviours. Research shows that when service experience focuses on delivering a benefit to the customer such as 'Responsiveness', 'Low effort' or 'Easy to do business with', this leads to higher levels of customer engagement and ultimately better business performance.

Our statistical modelling of Customer Experience over the last 15 years has identified core attributes that organisations need to perform well on in order to deliver great service. These are:

1. First contact query resolution
2. Quick query resolution
3. Ability to speak/engage with someone quickly.

And in terms of best practice we recognise the following service attributes as key drivers of positive customer service:

1. Knowledgeable staff
2. Staff that are able to listen to the customer effectively
3. Staff that are personable
4. Staff taking ownership of the query to ensure resolution
5. Timeliness.

What do you consider to be a good, bad or ugly rating for customer satisfaction? We conduct a lot of customer research and when it comes to reporting back the results, 9 times out of 10 we will be asked, 'is that a good satisfaction score?' So today I wanted to shed some light on what we, as researchers and analysts, believe to be a good score as well as what we consider to be best in class

Now the complication in all of this is that organisations do not universally use the same scale to rate satisfaction, recommendation or other key indices. Some organisations use a 5-point scale and others a 10-point scale. Our preference is the 7-point scale. Why? I'll save that topic for another time. Whatever the scale used, we apply a simple calculation that creates an index score out of 100. We are than able use this index to compare results across all organisations.

So back to my original question. What is a good score?

From analysing all the data across our studies we have found the following:

1. For satisfaction the average rating index in Australia is 68/100. This equates to a mean score of roughly 5.0 based on a 7-point satisfaction rating scale or a mean score of 3.7 based on a 5-point scale.
2. We would consider 85/100 and above to be 'Best in Class' performance. At the other end of the scale we would consider scores of 60/100 or less to be very poor indeed.
3. Based on Global benchmarks the highest average satisfaction rating is recorded in Canada, with an average index rating of 74/100 followed by New Zealand where the average satisfaction rating is 73/100. The average satisfaction rating is lowest in Brazil at 65/100.

These results are based purely on satisfaction ratings. So what about other measures?

In many of the studies we conduct, we also often ask customers to rate the performance of the agent who handled their enquiry, across a range of attributes often linked to the organisation's Service Charter. This typically includes performance ratings on attributes such as 'Agent knowledge', 'Agent responsiveness', 'Agent politeness' and so on. Again it is worth knowing what a 'good, bad or ugly' score is to help interpret your results. Looking back over the studies we have conducted we would consider an indexed attribute performance score of 72/100 as 'Average'. Again 85/100 and above is considered 'Best in Class' performance.

So there you have it, 'Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo'.