Telephone X-Ray

What determines the satisfaction of a customer contacting you by telephone?
How can customer satisfaction on the telephone be assured? There are many ideas, books and theories from management gurus and other sources, but frequently their answers are contradictory. A science in its early stages, such as customer behaviour, is often ruled by accepted dogma – however, wasn’t the earth flat for centuries until the belief was challenged?

Instead of relying on accepted theory or gut feelings MÖBIUS has undertaken research that really determines customer satisfaction in telephone calls to a service department. We found a few surprises in our research:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as “Pick-up within three rings”, “80% of calls answered within 20 seconds” are the measurements that contact centres generally use to ensure customer satisfaction. MÖBIUS’ research found that although many contact centres do well when using KPI measurement, customers are often less satisfied than expected. Therefore something must be wrong.
To help Customer Service Directors determine where they should direct their budget to ensure a high customer satisfaction level is reached efficiently, an ambitious research project called Telephone X-Ray has been launched by MÖBIUS’ working in collaboration with Ghent University. The goal of the project is twofold - to reveal the factors that contribute most to customer satisfaction in contact centres, and to determine the importance and mutual dependencies of each of those parameters.
As part of the research project we interviewed 2600 Call Centre customers within one day of their contact with one of the 11 participating contact centres. We didn’t want to base our findings on averages so all the calls were analysed on a case-by-case basis, using 140 parameters. This meant that they could study links between details such as the level of customer satisfaction; the specific agent who dealt with the customer; the level of that agent’s job satisfaction and the length of time the customer waited in a queue before being served.

Surprising conclusions:
One of the most surprising conclusions from the project is the absence of a relationship between customer satisfaction and job satisfaction of the agent dealing with the customer. It was also found that the use of a toll-free number doesn’t influence customer satisfaction. Moreover, more than 30% of the customers are unaware if the number is toll-free or not.

The research also showed that 88% of customers who waited 20 seconds or less claimed that their waiting time was short. Not a surprising conclusion on its own, however even when the waiting time increased to 50 seconds 86% of customers still found the waiting time to be short, which dismisses the “80% within 20 seconds” rule.

Customer satisfaction was found to be influenced most by the competence and helpfulness of the service agent. Of second importance was the “first call resolution” level followed by the length of waiting time before a customer is answered.
Read more about the full research report .