Vocal Laboratories Announces Four Strategies To Turn Customer Service Into A Competitive Weapon

In an era of poor customer service, quality service can win customers

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., December 13, 2002 - Recent surveys show that over 90% of customers form their image of a company based on call center experiences. VocaLabs surveys show that even after one single poorly handled contact, customers are half as likely to continue to do business, and support information indicates that in some industries and demographic categories nearly all customers will take their business elsewhere. Good service is the single most important "public relations" focus a company can have to ensure that all callers receive a consistent, high quality experience.

Today many callers are still left frustrated. Customer service systems are often difficult to navigate and callers do not get the answers they need. There are systems designed to make it difficult to speak with a customer service representative. Customer service representatives can be unhelpful, poorly trained, give excuses not solutions, and provide wrong answers.

"Quality customer service can be a real differentiator. Vocalabs has developed four survey strategies for improving customer service and ensuring that every customer gets the highest quality and most cost effective service possible," commented Jessica J. Ament, VP of Marketing at Vocal Laboratories.

The strategies that Vocal Laboratories is announcing are:

Tune Up: A straightforward evaluation of call center performance, from the customer's perspective, looking for simple ways to improve customer service.

Benchmarking: Benchmark current call center performance against industry norms. Measure the effectiveness of changes on call center performance.

Automated Systems: Evaluate and test an automated system before it goes live, leading to improved effectiveness, improved customer retention, and reduced project risk.

Competitive Analysis: Evaluate where a call center stands in relation to its competition and what changes it can adopt to improve its service.

Vocal Laboratories will present four strategies to make customer service enhance marketing at the Sales & Marketing Executives of Minneapolis/St. Paul Morning Workshop on Friday, December 13, 2002.

About Vocal Laboratories

VocaLabs provides feedback about telephone-based services to Fortune 1000 companies, telecommunications carriers, industry consultants, and equipment vendors. We use a panel of thousands of people we've recruited from all walks of life to quickly and cost-effectively evaluate the quality of call centers, voice-response systems, and speech-recognition applications.

The VocaLabs Survey process helps customers gain statistical intelligence on caller issues and problematic applications. This extensive data gathering process helps customers gain the information to ensure customer retention, increased revenues, market intelligence to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction.

For VocaLabs news and information, please go to http://www.vocalabs.com.