The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Blog updates
Wednesday - July 23, 2008 12:28 PM
....Just an aside, we upgraded our blog software, and had to revise all our templates to work with the new version.
I think I fixed everything, but there may be some weirdness remaining. My apologies in advance.
There are also a few minor changes: the main and category pages no longer have the links for comments (you'll have to visit the individual entry page for that). Perhaps we can bring those back in the future.
Another Short Hiatus
Friday - October 05, 2007 02:55 PM
I'm off to the SOCAP conference for the first half of next week, so there will be another short hiatus on this blog.
See you all again next week!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted by Peter Leppik
Another hiatus
Friday - September 07, 2007 05:08 PM
It feels like I just got back from SpeechTEK (and, indeed, I just did), but next week we're off to ACCE in San Diego.
So this blog will take another short hiatus until my return.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted by Peter Leppik
Short Hiatus
Friday - August 17, 2007 03:27 PM
The Customer Service survey will be on a short hiatus next week, as we're going to be at the SpeechTEK conference in New York.
If you're there, stop by our booth or come see me speak. I'll be speaking on Monday and Wednesday, and I'm also planning to attend the VUI designers' lunch on Wednesday. See you there!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted by Peter Leppik
Vacation Hiatus
Thursday - June 14, 2007 08:53 AM
I'm going to be on vacation for the next week, so this blog will take a short hiatus. See you soon!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Welcome, Consumerist visitors!
Wednesday - January 24, 2007 02:32 PM
A lot of people are visiting this blog today by way of The Consumerist, which linked to my article on Monday about the anatomy of a dissatisfied customer.
The survey and recordings I posted for that article were collected as part of our Service Quality Tracker program, which invites consumers to help us measure the quality of tech support at four major computer companies.
If you're interested in participating in this survey program, it's easy and open to all. All you need to do is use our alternative toll-free number when calling Apple, Dell, Gateway, or HP for tech support. We take care of the rest.
Posted by Peter Leppik
If you're interested in participating in this survey program, it's easy and open to all. All you need to do is use our alternative toll-free number when calling Apple, Dell, Gateway, or HP for tech support. We take care of the rest.
Posted by Peter Leppik
On The Road Again
Friday - September 08, 2006 11:55 AM
We're off to ICMI's Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) in Seattle 9/11 through 9/13. If you plan to be there, stop and say hello. We'd love to show off Express Feedback and our other services. In particular, we are proud of how we've enhanced our survey reporting software to provide virtually unlimited ways to slice and dice study data with only a few mouse clicks.
Depending on Internet access, we may be on blog hiatus until we get home next Thursday.
Posted by Peter and Rick
Posted by Peter and Rick
Brief Hiatus
Friday - June 16, 2006 12:25 PM
The Customer Service Survey will be on a brief hiatus next week, while I'm on vacation with my kids in Yellowstone.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Short hiatus
Thursday - April 27, 2006 02:00 PM
I apologize for the short hiatus. Rick and I were at the Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange (you know, the zombie conference) for the first part of this week, and now Rick is on a short leave.
But we'll be back to our usual bloggy goodness soon.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted by Peter Leppik
Good Advice- Send Money
Monday - December 12, 2005 03:17 PM
Once someone suggests something new and different to deploy in a customer service operation, sometimes within days every vendor seems to have a variation of the same suggestion. Evidently we all go to the same seminars and read the same articles. Regardless, the latest buzz topic is the poor practice of containing callers within self service by making an opt out to a live person more difficult. Just this morning I have been asked to participate in a seminar on the importance of not doing so, was solicited to read white papers on the subject, saw two best practice sales promotions from companies wanting to sell consulting services with the evils of forced containment being a priority topic, and received a newsletter quoting our research on the subject in relation to the importance of first call resolution.
I would not at all be surprised to go back 18 months and find some of these sources offering advice on how to accomplish forced containment whereas now they want to sell consulting on why it's a bad idea. Go figure.
No doubt first call resolution can be a reasonable proxy for assessing overall caller satisfaction plus the efficiency of a call center; that's not the point. Nor is the point that forcing callers to stay in the IVR is a bad idea. What is the point is I can't think of a single call center with the tools to accurately measure containment and FCR correctly anyway.
As Peter points out, a caller gives up on trying to get to an agent and hangs up. The system hardware marks this as a "contained" call. The caller tries again and fails. That's contained call #2. On the third try, the caller gets to an agent and resolves their business. To the company, the data shows they have a 66% call containment rate and maybe a 100% first call resolution score (which is often used as a measure of how well the operation is doing). But the data is bogus, the truth is the percentage of containment and first call success is zero.
It was over 20 years ago when I was selling services for a bell operating telephone company (RBOC) when I learned a truth. As a Bell rep. I found my suggestions on service quality ignored. Then when Ma Bell broke up and I, like many others, hung out a consulting shingle; I gave the very same advice and it was accepted as wise. The only difference is that as a consultant, they were paying to hear it.
So since you didn't pay anything to just read that your current performance data is likely bogus; that forcing callers to stay inside the IVR backfires and costs the company MORE money; you probably won't do anything about it. So, please send a check made out to Vocal Laboratories for $5000.00. Since you will then have paid to hear the truth, you'll have to take action.
Rick Rappe'
No doubt first call resolution can be a reasonable proxy for assessing overall caller satisfaction plus the efficiency of a call center; that's not the point. Nor is the point that forcing callers to stay in the IVR is a bad idea. What is the point is I can't think of a single call center with the tools to accurately measure containment and FCR correctly anyway.
As Peter points out, a caller gives up on trying to get to an agent and hangs up. The system hardware marks this as a "contained" call. The caller tries again and fails. That's contained call #2. On the third try, the caller gets to an agent and resolves their business. To the company, the data shows they have a 66% call containment rate and maybe a 100% first call resolution score (which is often used as a measure of how well the operation is doing). But the data is bogus, the truth is the percentage of containment and first call success is zero.
It was over 20 years ago when I was selling services for a bell operating telephone company (RBOC) when I learned a truth. As a Bell rep. I found my suggestions on service quality ignored. Then when Ma Bell broke up and I, like many others, hung out a consulting shingle; I gave the very same advice and it was accepted as wise. The only difference is that as a consultant, they were paying to hear it.
So since you didn't pay anything to just read that your current performance data is likely bogus; that forcing callers to stay inside the IVR backfires and costs the company MORE money; you probably won't do anything about it. So, please send a check made out to Vocal Laboratories for $5000.00. Since you will then have paid to hear the truth, you'll have to take action.
Rick Rappe'
Conversations
Thursday - October 27, 2005 02:25 PM
I'm just back at my desk from several days at the Nuance (Scansoft) annual "Conversations" conclave for Nuance clients and vendors. I was continually pleased that in every seminar with a focus on quality self service customer care that the speaker emphasized the need to test the applications for ease of use and caller satisfaction. That is a considerable change from the recent past when usability testing was seen as an afterthought or at best a necessary evil.
I was particularly pleased by a presentation of best practices given by representatives of AOL and Aetna Insurance which went a needed step further because they hit on a seldom addressed issue surrounding satisfaction testing. Specifically, that some tests are better than others. Now while that may seem obvious, and I am hard pressed not to be supportive of any testing that can result in improving the quality of the caller experience; there is a great deal of poor methodology out there that can and does result in faulty conclusions about how customers are actually being served.
Consumer survey is both an art and a science that few realize can be tough to get right. Who you ask, when you ask, who does the asking and even the wording you use can dramatically impact the quality of information received. In particular, there is a strong and often unrealized tendency to flavor a survey toward a predetermined conclusion that serves no one except perhaps the manager wanting to impress the executives.
I would like to say that test administrator bias is a minor issue, but we see too many instances of obvious flavoring of the questions to call the problem inconsequential. "Would you buy our product again, or would you like to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick?" is not as uncommon a style of question as you might expect. Perhaps I exaggerate to make my point, but if the manager is likely to be awarded as a result of a positive set of results, is it wise to have that same manager in charge of the study? This lack of rigorous objectivity is one of the reasons people distrust statistics, and you owe it to yourself and your company to make sure that any study you accept as a way to gauge consumer opinion is objective and most probably requires the services of a professional to get right.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Consumer survey is both an art and a science that few realize can be tough to get right. Who you ask, when you ask, who does the asking and even the wording you use can dramatically impact the quality of information received. In particular, there is a strong and often unrealized tendency to flavor a survey toward a predetermined conclusion that serves no one except perhaps the manager wanting to impress the executives.
I would like to say that test administrator bias is a minor issue, but we see too many instances of obvious flavoring of the questions to call the problem inconsequential. "Would you buy our product again, or would you like to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick?" is not as uncommon a style of question as you might expect. Perhaps I exaggerate to make my point, but if the manager is likely to be awarded as a result of a positive set of results, is it wise to have that same manager in charge of the study? This lack of rigorous objectivity is one of the reasons people distrust statistics, and you owe it to yourself and your company to make sure that any study you accept as a way to gauge consumer opinion is objective and most probably requires the services of a professional to get right.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Off to Seattle
Friday - September 16, 2005 12:33 PM
Rick and I are off to Seattle this weekend for the second annual ACCE show.
This is the first time we've been there, but we heard from some companies which exhibited last year that it was pretty good.
If you have a chance, stop by and see us. We'll be in Booth 516.
We'll try to keep the blog updated during the show, but we don't yet know what we'll find in terms of Internet access.
Posted by Peter Leppik
If you have a chance, stop by and see us. We'll be in Booth 516.
We'll try to keep the blog updated during the show, but we don't yet know what we'll find in terms of Internet access.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Welcome to The Customer Service Survey!
Monday - August 22, 2005 02:03 PM
Welcome to The Customer Service Survey, VocaLabs' weblog about the challenges of providing good customer service. We plan to use this as a forum for all manner of topics related to customer service, from the challenges of measuring your performance, to the organizational obstacles that keep some companies from doing a good job, to sharing horror stories we see around the Net.
This is a less formal format than our newsletters and press releases, and we expect to be publishing much more frequently. We're also going to spend more time with opinion, commentary, and general observations.
Hence the name: The Customer Service Survey. Most people use the phrase to mean a survey of customers about their experience, but we also have another meaning in mind. From the Oxford American Dictionary:
Survey (noun): A general view, examination, or description of someone or something: the author provides a survey of the relevant literature.
So this blog is both about surveys, and also a survey itself, in different senses of the word.
We hope you'll find this interesting and relevant!
Posted by Peter Leppik
Hence the name: The Customer Service Survey. Most people use the phrase to mean a survey of customers about their experience, but we also have another meaning in mind. From the Oxford American Dictionary:
Survey (noun): A general view, examination, or description of someone or something: the author provides a survey of the relevant literature.
So this blog is both about surveys, and also a survey itself, in different senses of the word.
We hope you'll find this interesting and relevant!
Posted by Peter Leppik