In-gage is a salesforce app, which helps to measure and improve customer loyalty & advocacy by changing the behaviours of front line staff. We have developed a Salesforce quality assurance solution that helps contact centres and call centres ensure that they deliver consistent customer service utilising the power of salesforce. In our latest infographic we show you 4 steps to improve your Quality assurance program.
In-gage has a salesforce employee engagement solution, which helps contact centres and call centres to measure and improve employee engagement by changing the behaviours of front line staff. We have developed a Salesforce employee engagement tool that helps contact centres and call centres ensure that they deliver consistent customer service with a highly engaged and trained frontline staff utilising the power of salesforce. In our latest infographic we show you 4 steps to improve your Employee Engagement program.
This video is designed to help you train I-vie on NPS records.
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If you run a contact centre or you are a team leader in customer service team then you will be familiar with the challenge of ensuring that each customer is provided with the highest quality of service every time that customers interact with your service team. The customer service teams that achieve the highest NPS scores and customer satisfaction scores are able to deliver a high degree of consistent customer service. Consistency of service means that your contact centre or customer service team is providing service to customers that complies with your company’s service standards and any industry specific regulations.
The key to ensuring that your customer service team is delivering consistent service is to ensure that you have a strong quality assurance and auditing program. With some contact centres handling thousands of calls a day and millions per month the big challenge is developing a quality assurance program that serves the customer and protects your business. In this article we look at the 3 steps that you need to deliver consistently amazing customer service experiences to your customers.
Basics of Consistent Service
In order to ensure consistence of service you need to ensure that your Quality Assurance and Auditing process covers three main areas; compliance to regulations, behaviour and process, de-risk the company. Of course the starting point for ensuring that you are delivering great and consistent customer service is the training and coaching program that you have in place for agents. The quality assurance and auditing that program that you put in place is a constant check to ensure that customer service and contact centre agents are actually doing what they were trained.
A good quality assurance program will check to ensure that agents are using the correct tone of voice and complying with regulations. If you work in a highly regulated industry such as finance ensuring that agents are following procedure is essential to protect customers and the business. Companies that you do not have a strong compliance program face the risk of significant fines from regulators and reputational damage that will affect your customer loyalty.
1. Sample Size
If you want to understand and monitor every interaction that your service team is having with customers then the most basic step is decide on the sample size for testing. Sample size is the key issue for many organisations. It is often the case in our experience that companies can only manage to test around 1% of all customer interactions. If the quality assurance program for your service organisation can only check 1% of customer interactions and the team handles a million calls a month then this is putting your company at risk.
Most companies will decide to choose a sample of customer cases to test for quality. The challenge is to figure out which sample size to collect. Some companies will focus on random case, cases with high touch rates or focus on a particular case type. If as a business you know that certain cases are subject to regulations then you will most likely focus on those cases.
The main challenge is to eliminate as much risk to the business as possible and ensure that all customer needs are being met. With the development of AI technology it is now possible for customer service companies to measure and analyse the vast majority of customer cases. In addition to this with AI technology you can start to look at critical errors across the organisation by analysing text and using speech analytics technology. The In-gage Salesforce app allows contact centres to use AI technology to assist them with quality audits and assessments.
2. Real time Feedback
The ability to use AI technology to measure and ensure that you are delivering great customer service means that instead of quality audits being done after 3-6 months this can be done continuously. The standard quality assurance and auditing program will normally involve endless excel spreadsheets and number crunching with the results taking months to reach agents if at all. It is important that all your quality forms and checks are kept in your salesforce environment.
The most important thing is to get the information as quickly as possible to agents and team leaders. The quicker you are able to get the information across to agents then you can resolve issues faster and protect the customer and business if there any critical errors. If there is long delay in feedback being delivered then this will also have an impact on the training and development of agents. If you are able to get the relevant information to the agent quickly then they are able to self-correct. The information can also be used to update your training and development programs for existing and new agents.
3. Policing or Training Tool?
The next main issue is how is the feedback then used in your service team. There are two likely approaches to feedback; training and development or policing. If your quality program is used a policing tool for agents then this can become a problem in our experience. In order to deliver great service agents need to be highly engaged. It’s important that agents don’t view there team leaders as supervisors seeking to dissect and interrogate there every move.
The most ideal use for the feedback that you receive from your quality assurance program is as tool for training and development. If you find that agents are having trouble solving a particular case type then you can include in your coaching program and update your induction training program for new agents.
It is important that all the feedback that you receive is developed into a systemised coaching program that allows for agents to learn and improve. The key to a good quality program is that it is used to improve the quality of service by helping agents to self-improve supported by continuous training programs.
The In-gage Salesforce contact centre app allows contact centres and customer service organisations to improve their service organisation and prove the ROI of service. In our app we have a quality assurance and auditing tool that allows customer service teams to carry out quality assessments inside of salesforce in real-time with the use of AI technology.
This document is designed for admin users. In this document, we will cover how the survey eligibility field works and how you can edit the criteria. Please note this is a formula field and you will need to understand how formulas work in Salesforce
In this course we will look at:
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Here are the 4 tips to improving your Service Efficiency in Salesforce
If you run a contact centre you want to ensure that it is being run as efficiently as possible without reducing the quality of the contact centre. The most pressing challenge for any customer services director is to reduce as much cost as possible. Let’s say that if you have a contact centre with 300 people and 10% or even 1% of your team isn’t performing effectively then that could end up increasing your service costs by thousands if not millions. As a Director of a contact centre you will be focused obsessively on that 1% or 10% of your contact centre that is not performing effectively. As a Customer Service Director you are focused on ensuring that all of your resources are working efficiently for the customer, employee and the business.
So while focusing on the 10% or 1% of your team that isn’t performing effectively might seem a bit extreme, small improvements will lead to a massive saving for your organisation. If you run a large service team that handles millions of calls a month then achieving a 1% saving can reduce the cost of your contact centre by thousands of dollars. While contact centres and customer service teams focus on creating efficiencies its important that this isn’t at the cost of service quality. It’s great to trim costs but if its at the expense of service quality then that will affect customer loyalty and word of mouth sales. Service efficiency needs to be focused on creating the balance between customer satisfaction and reducing the cost to serve.
Reduce the Cost to serve
Companies calculate the cost to serve in a variety of ways, but it usually includes headcount, desks, chairs and a range of miscellaneous costs. The main challenge for reducing cost of your service isn’t necessarily about getting rid of your equipment or buying cheaper hardware but managing your case load. If you are able to handle customer queries on a first time basis, reduce your internal hand over rate between agents and help customer self serve then you are on your way to reducing the cost of your contact centre or customer service team and maintaining your customer loyalty and advocacy.
The key is to focus on tactical service efficiency not blunt service efficiency. If customers are not getting their problems the first time they call your centre then this will increase the cost of service. Imagine that you have a million customers calling your service team and 25% of customers are having to repeat contact your team to get the issue solved. That’s a staggering 250,000 repeat calls and queries entering your system monthly. It’s not just an extra cost but the fact that a customer has to call your customer service or contact centre team repeatedly will affect customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
In addition to this if agents are handing over cases to other agents or departments then this only increases the workload for your team. If 10% of your cases are being passed from agent to agent not only is it another case adding to the volume but also it causes undue stress for the customer. Excessive hand overs between agents increases the time spent on cases and increases the stress for customers.
Reducing Customer Effort
If your contact centre or customer service team is making it hard for customers to solve their problems or queries, then that will affect your customer loyalty and your customer advocacy. If you can reduce the number of touch points or hurdles that your customers go through then you can increase efficiency and maintain the quality of the customer service that you provide for customers. In our experience we have known of a customer calling a contact centre 70 times and eventually had to be contacted by the contact centre director to understand the issue.
If you want to reduce the cases coming into your service team and help customers to self-serve then you can do this through chatbots and portals for customers. This however solves the issue of the volume of cases coming into your customer service team. The next step is then to measure the internal hand off rates within your service team. When you measure the internal hand off rates you can start to see if agents need particular training on a particular cases type or if there is a problem with the process. If you find that billing cases are leading to the most internal hand-overs then you can start to design specified training courses for individual agents rather than conducting general training courses for the entire team. It is also important that all of the measuring and reporting takes place natively in your salesforce system. In our experience we have seen that once one of our clients started measuring internal handoffs, they could see that 35% of cases were being internally handed off. They also found that some agents were able to deal with a cancellation process 85% of the time in the first instance while other agents could only manage it 20% of the time.
With the development of AI technology you can now utilise this to help make solving customer problems much easier. At In-gage we developed AI technology that sits within Salesforce that categorises customer cases and ensures that it is directed to the right person and team, reducing the customer effort and eliminating the need for internal handoffs.
The Vexed issue: Average Handling Time
Then there is the vexed issue of putting in place the right service efficiency metrics for your service team. This takes us to the issue of the most common metric used for efficiency: Average handling time (AHT). It is thought that by reducing average handling time you can reduce the cost. It’s an important metric but can negatively impact the quality of the service that you provide for your customers. The problem with average handling time is that it drives agents to fix problems within a fixed time frame, which can lead to agents cherry picking cases or handing cases over to other agents.
All of the data in the real time can help speed up the process and help the training in the contact centre. Return on investment through the efficiency’s improvement. As a service team director you can put efficiency alongside customer loyalty if all of your data sits within your CRM in particular Salesforce.
At In-gage we developed our Salesforce Contact centre app with the aim of allowing contact centres and customer service organisations to monitor their first contact resolution, measure agent handovers and overall service efficiency. Our Salesforce app also allows service organisations to measure how many customers are repeat contacting and re-opening support cases. With the AI technology in our salesforce app we can help increase customer satisfaction by routing cases to the appropriate agent and team and ensuring cases are solved speedily and effectively.
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One of the challenges that customer service directors and contact centre managers have is putting the right systems in place to ensure that customer needs are met in a quick and efficient manner. The desire to create an efficient service operation naturally leads to the issue of KPI’s. For many service professionals KPI’s are often a vexed issue as sometimes the desire to meet certain numbers can also drive the wrong behaviours. Often the original meaning for the KPI’s gets lost or is simply not communicated to employees. So it’s important that you have the right KPI’s in place to drive the right behaviours.
When deciding the right KPI’s for your contact centre it’s important that you consider the customer, employee and business. The metrics that you have in your organisation needs to be geared towards all three, if one metric is weighted towards another there leads to an imbalance. As an example if you chose Average Handling Time (AHT) as a metric it might benefit the business, but it might impact negatively employee behaviour which would affect your customer delivery. However if you train your employees well then Average Handling Time can be a good metric for your contact centre. The key is the meaning behind KPI’s that you put in place for your contact centre. Let’s look at the 4 key metrics that will help positively the employee, the business and the customer.
The Customer Feedback metric
The most important metric for your contact centre and the broader business is customer feedback. From the business perspective you want to know if your customers are going to stay or leave and if they will recommend your business to their friends and colleagues. If you are the customer you want the right or incorrect processes improved so that you get the best experience. From the perspective of the employee you want processes that will help deliver good service to customers.
In the industry today there is a lot of customer feedback metrics such as customer satisfaction score, NPS and customer effort score to name a few. For us at In-gage the main thing that you want to focus on is will the customer stay and will they recommend the business. If you can track these things and link it into the internal CRM system then you can start to measure the ROI of service. In our experience we have seen companies increasing their NPS scores by 22%, 30% reduction in customer churn and making £500k in additional profits in six months.
The Service Efficiency Metric
The next thing is service efficiency. The main thing is to measure service efficiency at a macro level rather than at an individual level to avoid bad behaviours. The most common story is the service agent that passes of customers to other agents to improve their average handling time. As a service organisation you want to give your employees the tools that they need to provide the best experience for customers.
As a contact centre the main focus needs to be on first contact resolution. The main thing for a contact centre efficiency is ensuring that all customer queries are completed in the first instance. If your contact centre is in a situation where 25% of customers are repeat contacting the service to solve a problem then this becomes costly for the business. In addition to this you want to ensure that your internal systems are ensuring that internal handoffs are being reduced so that customers don’t have to deal with unnecessary delays.
Quality, Consistency and Compliance
The next key metric for the effective running of a contact centre or customer service organisation is quality, consistency and compliance. If you’re a customer you want to ensure that you get the same experience each time they come into contact with the service team. As a customer in addition to great service you want to ensure that processes are in place to protect and safeguard sensitive information.
From a business perspective you want to ensure that all members of the team are following the same promise that delivers a great experience and that ensures that all compliance rules are being followed. The last thing that you want as a business is to suffer heavy fines because your contact centre team didn’t follow the correct rules. If contact centre agents aren’t following processes, then you want to ensure that they are being trained and corrected when mistakes are being made as a central part of your quality assurance program.
Employee Engagement
The final metric that we believe to be important is employee engagement. How engaged is the team that is interacting with customers? We have found that engaged employees provide better service and help deliver increased customer satisfaction. As a business you want to ensure that employees are being managed properly and that employees have a voice in the business.
Are employees responding to their managers? Are they developing and being coached effectively? These are key areas that need to be measured in order to create engaged teams. If you want agents working there best for customers they need to supported by their managers and they need to be provided with relevant training. In our experience we have found that teams that are managed well tend to perform better than others. Also if agents are not being coached or trained then this can lead to increased levels of dis-engagement and frustration.
The main thing is to ensure that employees have a voice in the business and have an avenue to speak up about issues in the business. Once employees are engaged in the business you will be able to increase employee retention and this will lead to better quality and consistency.
All together in real time
It’s one thing to have metrics, but it needs to be a part of a real time loop. Often the 4 key metrics are often done at different points in time, sometimes once a year or 2 times a year. The closer that you can get to live feedback will help you to drive change in the business and lead to increased profits for the business. The importance is to get the speed of evolution increased by measuring all 4 metrics in real time. It is important that all of this occurs in real time.
This is one of the reasons that we developed our native salesforce contact centre app to allow companies to measure all of these 4 key metrics of customer service in real time. The In-gage app allows you to measure in salesforce customer feedback, first contact resolution, quality and team engagement. Utilising AI technology we are able to provide AI assisted customer feedback that helps to make the task of measuring and analysing customer loyalty and NPS much easier and gives companies the ability to link these to business metrics such as word of mouth sales and customer loyalty. With the assistance of artificial intelligence we also provide AI assisted case categorisation and language detection that ensures that the right cases are routed to the most appropriate customer service agent.
Our salesforce contact centre app also takes away the messy excel sheets and allows you to conduct your quality audits inside of salesforce ensuring that you are able to maintain your quality assurance program in real time. As a company that has been working in the area of customer service for over 20 years our app allows service teams to prove the business value of service. Instead of service being a ‘necessary cost’ we are able to prove that customer service is an ‘investment’ that pays off.
Here are our 4 tips for getting the most from your customer feedback using the latest in AI technology.
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