How satisfied were your customers with their interaction with your contact centre?

Improved customer service was one of the big call centre selling tools when we first started talking about the call centres. Call centres were installed - with a hefty price tag attached to some of these installations.

Technology improved and terminology changed. We moved from the call centre to the contact centre, where technology is capable of catering for interaction across a wide range of mediums, including face to face, telephone, fax, e-mail and even SMS. The call centre then became the cornerstone for CRM (customer relationship management). However, many more CRM implementations failed - perhaps because too much emphasis is placed on the technology aspects and not enough emphasis on providing a better service to the customer.

A number of organisations measure the performance of their call centre. But the measures are based on how many calls are answered per day, per month or during a specific campaign. They know how many inbound and how many outbound calls have been received or made, but the questions remain:

* Was the customer satisfied, or dare we ask delighted, with the service?

* What type of experience did the customer have when interacting with the company?

* Did the customer get the information or service he was looking for?

Measuring and benchmarking dates way back to the 1960s when IBM started comparing the relative performance of different computer hardware and software with the use of very scientific methods to measure performances in terms of time and resulting performance of the equipment being tested. Today there are software packages available for call centre benchmarking. Measuring how many calls were answered in an hour and how long it took to reroute a call, or how long customers had to queue before speaking to an agent only reflects the efficiency of the technology, but does not give any feedback of the type of experience the client had in dealing with the company.

ATIO Corporation, an active player in the contact centre market space for many years, has developed a unique service called "e-valuation". This service provides executives and contact centre management staff with vital information on customer experiences when interacting face-to-face or with the contact centre. The service focuses on the experience of the customer and reports on the entire customer experience as opposed to the traditional contact centre measurement products that measures from the inside out, for example, how quickly a call was answered, and how long the customer had to queue.

ATIO`s e-valuation service measures the customer`s experience from the outside in, in real-time and through this method can report back on exactly how satisfied a customer was on a given day. This is done by the `mystery shopping` method. For instance dealing with an organisation providing loans to clients, a mystery client, from the ATIO e-valuation team, will phone in and apply for a loan. Various aspects of the service can be measured, such as voice clarity, switching languages if necessary, product knowledge, enthusiasm and the opportunity to evaluate many other soft agent skills. But equally important, the service delivery can be measured: was the loan approved in the promised time?

The ATIO service will also measure the technology aspects such as on-hold time, bottlenecks in the systems, IVR responses and incorrect scripting. Any errors or deficiencies in the technology aspects can be fed back to the call centre in real-time, allowing for immediate rectification of issues that could have gone undetected.

The ATIO team will work with the organisation to identify the goals and objectives of the contact centre and devise the most appropriate measure to assist the customer with improving customer interaction. Business processes will be evaluated to ensure the correct interfaces are available and agents have access to the required information.

We know that better customer service results in greater customer loyalty and reduction in customer churn, with resultant benefits to bottom line profitability. Measuring technology efficiency helps us understand the technology bottlenecks, but evaluating customer satisfaction helps us understand our service quality shortcomings.