You run a customer service function, and you want to offer the best possible experience to your users. The demography of your users ranges from 18 to 70 years across geographies. 

To address their demands and needs, you have a presence in all the channels – telephone, emails, web, and social. Besides, you have integrated your customer service system with your CRM, ERP, and Accounting. At the click of a button, your agents and intelligent systems have access to all the customer information. 

You need to have the right systems and the right resources to manage and maintain high-quality service across every channel. 

While you are optimistic about all the channels, are you putting your money where it is needed the most?

Organizations use multiple metrics to measure customer satisfaction levels across channels. They are: 

1. Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT)
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
4. Customer Churn Rate
5. Customer Health Score
6. Abandonment Rate

Not all of these metrics would apply to your business. You need to be aware of why you are measuring, which would help define what you need to measure. 

Voice of the Customer 

Customer listening is an essential practice of any CX program. It would help if you had the feedback from customers – without which you can’t understand customer’s perceptions and make plans to improve. 

About 90% of customer experience initiatives use surveys. You, as a brand, request your customers to fill out a survey, at the end of a completed experience. Structured questions can help you calculate scores like CSAT, NPS, and CES. 

The biggest drawback of surveys is that they are solicited feedback, and only happy and unhappy customers provide the input. Response rates of less than 10% are standard for most customer satisfaction surveys. 

Survey-based listening gets you only less than 10% of responses. While the reactions provide you a direction on what needs improvement and what needs optimization, brands should not stop at solicited feedback. 

How do you extend your customer listening? 

There are a bunch of things that you can do that are right up your alley. Few pointers are: 

1. Begin with call recordings – analyze them to learn about customer sentiments and issues
2. Seek feedback from your frontline employees and service technicians. They tend to see and observe several unstated needs of customers 
3. Text captured in customer emails, web site forms, call center agent notes, chat interactions, or even SMS
4. Social media mining – listen to comments posted on social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blogs, and review sites
5. Customer churn rate – keep monitoring this and figure out why they are leaving
6. Google analytics – if you observe a high bounce rate or abandonment rate on your website from visitors coming from Facebook, it’s indicating a disconnect between your website and social marketing
7. Customer health score – a combination of product/service usage, customer support, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. An average of this would provide a view of your customer’s health.

While surveys are the foundation of customer experience feedback, you should complement it by extending your customer listening to even inferred input based on customer interactions.

My bank blocked my card, and the reason given was that I did not submit my KYC (Know Your Customer) documents for renewal. I was asked to submit those documents by mail to reactivate the card. 

I promptly sent my scanned and self-attested KYC documents. I received a response with the ticket number. In a couple of days, I received a mail and a message stating that the address in the documents that I submitted doesn’t match the address they have on file. 

I was stuck. 

So, I called their customer service number. I was told to submit my KYC for the previous address where I lived about eight years ago. Once that is accepted, I was told to change the address and submit the documents for the new address. 

I felt stupid listening to this suggestion. Also, I did not have any documents for the old address where I lived. 

I explained to them the situation, and the customer service representative politely asked me to write about this situation to another email address. 

I wrote to the new email address explaining the situation. I promptly received a ticket number, and within a day, I received an automated response stating that the details they have in the file don’t match the new KYC documents that I submitted. 

I was surprised by this response. So, I decided to cancel my subscription and hand over my blocked card back to the bank. 

Within a few hours, I received another response stating that my KYC has been accepted and the card is reactivated. 

They saved me the botheration of calling up the customer care again and cancelling my subscription with this mail. 

What are the touchpoints that I used here? 

I used email and telephone as two touchpoints to reach the bank. Were they helpful in resolving my issue? Partially yes, as there was some intervention from someone that made the resolution possible. 

What could they have done differently? 

1. They could have provided me with an option to update my address in their records and provide the KYC documents for the new address
2. They could have confirmed my new address with a phone call 
3. They could have provided me with a web link to upload my KYC documents along with the change of address. They could have automated the process of document acceptance 
4. They could have provided access back to my Internet login for a couple of days, allowing me to update the change of address and then submit my KYC documents

Intelligence at the touchpoint level

This entire process of updating the KYC took about ten days. This could have easily been just a couple of days. 

There was very little intelligence with both the touchpoints. When I sent an email, it had the intelligence to generate the ticket number and nothing beyond that. When I called up the customer service, the executive had the intelligence to provide me with the new email address to explain my issue and nothing beyond that. 

If there were ways that these two touchpoints can be made intelligent, it’d make the lives of customers and the customer service staff easier.