The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Why Does VocaLabs Exist?
Monday - May 01, 2006 02:37 PM in
Just back from the mentioned Frost & Sullivan MindXchange, I was gratified by the changes evident over the need for solid answers to customer satisfaction and the increasing awareness that quality matters in the service a company delivers as well as getting honest data on what callers really think.
But there was still a troubling issue. Namely, many still cling to the belief that having some sort of focus group on caller satisfaction is sufficient to assure the delivery of good service. With any non-homogeneous customer base the belief that feedback from a dozen or so individuals is enough to guarantee all customers are well served, simply makes no sense. Lets say for example that a call center handling a million calls has 25% of it's customers from a particular demographic; perhaps retirees. So the focus group usability expert makes sure that 25% of the group is retired. In a focus group of 12, that means three individuals. Do you really think feedback from three people is enough to be confident that a quarter million calls from retirees will receive good service? Substitute any demographic, of age, income, education, cultural differences or language and the problem is the same.
If the goal is to know truthfully how a system or application serves all customers, whether self service technology or a live agent call center; there is no substitute for having enough feedback from as large a group as possible so as to uncover problems. For example, if there is an issue affecting only 1% of callers that can still amount to a lot of business, and it takes 500 test calls to reliably hit the problem just one time.
So yes, the focus group is a great way to come up with a design for a service, but only a large group of real people exercising the service will answer whether the design is as good as it can be.
Posted by Rick Rappe
If the goal is to know truthfully how a system or application serves all customers, whether self service technology or a live agent call center; there is no substitute for having enough feedback from as large a group as possible so as to uncover problems. For example, if there is an issue affecting only 1% of callers that can still amount to a lot of business, and it takes 500 test calls to reliably hit the problem just one time.
So yes, the focus group is a great way to come up with a design for a service, but only a large group of real people exercising the service will answer whether the design is as good as it can be.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Posted at 02:37 PM by | | | |