Customers tell you everything was “fine,” “good” or “great.” But researchers found that’s often not what they really think.
They aren’t as satisfied with customer service as they were last year – and they weren’t really satisfied then.
CFI Group’s The Contact Center Satisfaction Index dropped to 68 on the 100-point scale in 2019. That’s down 3% from the previous year.
Self-service impedes satisfaction
“In the world of self-service, customers now reserve only the toughest problems for the contact center agents,” says Sheri Petras, CEO of CFI Group. “Many simple questions are now handled by the customer on the company website, saving the complicated, frustrating questions for contact center agents.”
In their research, CFI often found the better customer satisfaction was with self-service options – such as website and mobile apps – the worse the score was for the contact center!
Prepare front-line customer service professionals
It can be difficult for customer service pros to perform up to expectations that come from an already frustrated customer.
But CFI experts suggest these strategies for front-line service pros to help frustrated customers and raise satisfaction.
- Give customers quicker access to service pros who can help. In the study, customers who reached a person directly were 27% more satisfied than those who first reached Interactive Voice Response (IVR). A voice is far more reassuring in times of frustration than a prompt to hit a number.
- Give service professionals more power. Satisfaction goes even higher when the person who takes customer calls handles the situation in one call. Service pros need ample amounts of training, discretion and support to make one-and-done happen.
- Get more mobile friendly. Nearly half of the customers who try to help themselves before calling customer service look at the website from their phones. And guess what? They usually find it difficult to find and decipher answers from the tiny screens. It’s more important than ever to make customer service functions – FAQs, contact information, account login and details, etc. – mobile friendly.
