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text message when goods are despatched and informing them what time their order will be delivered means they are far more likely to be available to receive and sign for the goods when they arrive.
Customer feedback So how do you know if customers accept this type of self service technology and does it really enhance the customer experience? The answer is simple—ask them! There is a growing trend in call centre
operations to collect customer feedback at the end of each call. This has several advantages over the usual method of post-transaction surveys, typically administered by post or email. When feedback is collected just after the interaction has taken place, the customer’s perceptions are immediate and relate to his current mood. These results are therefore far more reliable. How this works in practice is that the call centre
agent, at the end of the call, asks the customer if he would be willing to complete a 60-second survey. If the caller agrees he is transferred to an IVR or speech-recognition application. Best practice is to ask no more than four or five closed questions in a post-call survey. The caller is invited to rate how easy it was to contact the company, whether the agent was friendly and helpful, and whether the call outcome was satisfactory. Mail order retailers that use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology to test customer advocacy can also check the level of recommendation that the caller would apply based on this current transaction. The post-call survey should also have one open question—allowing the caller to give some free-flowing feedback—which can provide some great anecdotes for staff to receive where the feedback is positive. So does self-service need to be an excuse for
poor customer service? Well, that all depends on how well the IVR speech-recognition applications are designed and implemented and whether the retailer then acts upon the feedback received from customers. Those that do can reap significant rewards.
Paul Weald is strategy director, customer innovation, at contact centre consultancy and systems integrator ProtoCall One.
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What are the options?
Technology does have a potential role to play, and when implemented well, a speech-recognition application can help call centres to better manage the call demand. To be clear, a speech recognition application manages a call or part of a call by responding to spoken words and phrases from the caller. It can also accept input from the caller using touch-tone key presses, and can provide information to the caller using text-to-speech technology. Another term that is often used to describe these types of applications is “voice recognition”. The differences between speech recognition and voice recognition are subtle. A voice recognition application is one that verifies the identity of the caller. The term is used where the application actually recognises an individual caller’s voice, using voice biometrics, which is now beginning to become commercially practical to consider. However, there are other methods of caller verification, such as requesting identity information and passwords from the caller that can be automated as part of an ID and verification process.—PW
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