Retail Solutions: Leading Home Furnishing Retailer Improves Customer Satisfaction with UCN Echo
With a reputation for superior customer service, a leading home furnishing retailer wanted to further improve its call center operations and customer service levels by changing the way the company monitored calls and delivered customer service. It achieved these goals by adopting an innovative, industry leading customer survey and analysis tool, Echo, now available from UCN, Inc. (BULLETIN BOARD: UCNN).
Selling through more than 500 retail stores nationwide, as well as print and online catalogues, this multi-billion dollar company knows its customer service efforts are critical to the organization. Its inbound call center handles customer contacts for all of the company's many brands.
Automate Quality Survey -- Reduce Head Count Reduction
Prior to implementing the Echo automated survey tool, this customer service operation had six quality monitoring staff dedicated full-time to the monitoring function, conducting about five calls per month per customer service rep (CSR). Managers noticed that quality monitors tended to focus more on how the agent aligned with the criteria defined in the monitoring form than on the customer's contact experience. In short, the voice of the customer was not reflected in the quality reports.
After implementing Echo, the operation no longer needed six full time quality monitoring people, and the number of surveys conducted per agent month went up significantly because the function was automated. "The simple idea of just asking our customers how we are performing never crossed our minds," said the head of catalogue customer service. "It was like a light bulb went off in our heads when we discovered the Echo solution and realized we could get real- time survey results from our customers. Our biggest fear, when we first implemented Echo, was that our customer satisfaction numbers would be low. Amazingly, we were doing a great job -- 97 percent overall satisfaction. Only 3 percent of our customers weren't satisfied."
The second biggest impact to the customer service operation was the ability to drill down and understand in detail why a customer was dissatisfied. The team discovered that dissatisfaction among customers was less about "being nice and professional" on the phone and more about the ability of the CSR to solve the problem quickly and effectively. The Echo tool enables managers to quickly identify which calls received a low score, then drill down just on those calls to determine root cause.
Root causes often fell into such areas as product availability issues, price discrepancies and shipping issues. With the knowledge gained from the "drill downs", managers were now in a position to recommend spot training - training that addresses specific knowledge areas, such as how to quickly determine if a product is in stock or when it will be in stock, or how to determine when a product will ship or where it is in the shipping process. "Until you know where the CSR is falling short," said the customer service manager, "you don't know how to train that rep."
By utilizing Echo, real-time feedback is channeled directly from the customer to the front-line customer service rep. As a result, the agent can self-correct based on reviewing performance "gaps" as identified by the individual Echo score in comparison to the overall team scores. Feedback directed to the company's leadership team is available through on-line reports that can be filtered by such criteria as agent, team, location or product.
One of the main reasons this retailer chose to work with the Echo product, was that the Echo team was willing to customize the system, such as questions and reports, to meet their specific needs. A lot of the bigger companies won't do that, recalled the customer service manager.
Today, every division within the customer service group is using the Echo automated survey and agent scoring system. A key lesson the customer service manager learned is that "what's important to the company may not be important to the customer." And you don't really know what's important to the customer until you ask, then listen.
About UCN, Inc.
UCN is the leading provider of all-in-one, hosted contact handling services that improve the customer contact experience and the productivity of those handling the contacts. InContact includes an integrated suite of advanced contact handling applications and reporting, monitoring, recording, administration, workforce management and rep performance management applications. InControl is a unique, rapid application development tool that enables inContact customers to develop highly flexible, customized business contact handling processes in record time. To learn more about UCN visit www.ucn.net/
SOURCE: UCN,Inc