The Retention Factor with Rosanne D'Ausilio, Ph.D.
Do you know what a bad call experience costs you? More specifically,
Here are 3 questions for you:
- What is the cost of defection for your company?
- Do you know what percentage of your callers have a bad experience?
- Do you know the dollar amount attached to that bad call experience?
If you don’t, I suggest you find out. Even if you are guesstimating, this will at least give you an idea. I think you’ll be surprised--perhaps even amazed at the cost.
Here’s an example where we’ll use a call center that has:
200 agents
100 calls per day per agent
5% bad customer experiences
$50 customer revenue per sale
Now let’s do the math:
100 calls per day per agent
x 5% percentage of bad call experiences
5 bad calls per agent
200 agents
1000 bad experiences per day
240 days yr (20 days a month x 12)
240,000 annually (bad call experiences)
$50 customer revenue per sale
$12,000,000 million in lost revenue!
Many companies I’m familiar with have a much higher revenue per sale. I’m only using $50 here as an arbitrary example so you can see the impact. And this example used 5% as the percentage of bad customer experiences.
Plug in your numbers and see what your own true bottom line is in lost revenue.
The good news is that with just 1% improvement you can see recovered revenue. Using the same example:
240,000 bad call experiences annually
x 1% improvement
2,400 additional customers
$50 customer revenue per sale
$120,000 recovered revenue
What’s your fastest path to recovery? What’s a proven way to improve your customer service?
We say: Invest in your people. The better care you take of your employees, the better care they’ll take of your customers.
Train them, re-train them, and provide refresher courses that are strong in communication skills. But not just any kind of training. Be sure it’s customized to your applications, your issues, your challenges, and your customers so that you are hitting the nail on the head. It should be robust, highly interactive, with role playing of scenarios provided by your people, not off the shelf hit or miss topics.
An article I recently read put soft skills at 20% of training programs. While 20% is certainly better than nothing it’s not nearly enough.
Why?
Three reasons come to mind immediately:
- Because today’s customer is more sophisticated and requires skills not previously exercised. They have the power to choose who they will work with and what mode of communication works best for them.
- Because I believe that it’s in the space of communication relationships are formed, trust is established, and issues, complaints, problems are solved or resolved. Otherwise we could all use self service.
- When there is something more complex or complicated, we need to speak to a human. At this point it’s usually an accelerated call. That human need requires tools and techniques to engage and delight that customer---otherwise the customer is going to your competition.
Hardware and software support people, they don’t replace them! People make the difference.
ROSANNE D'AUSILIO, Ph.D., an industrial psychologist, consultant, master trainer, best selling author, executive coach, customer service expert, and President of Human Technologies Global, Inc., specializes in human performance management. Over the last 25 years, she has provided needs analyses, instructional design, and customized, live customer service skills trainings as well as executive/leadership coaching. Also offered is agent and facilitator university certification through Purdue University’s Center for Customer Driven Quality.
Known as 'the practical champion of the human,' she authors best sellers “Wake Up Your Call Center: Humanize Your Interaction Hub,” 4th ed, “Customer Service and the Human Experience,” “Lay Your Cards on the Table: 52 Ways to Stack Your Personal Deck (includes a 32-card deck of cards)—motivational and inspirational readings, How to Kick Your Customer Service Up A Notch: 101 Insider Tips , How to Kick Your Customer Service Up A Notch: ANOTHER 101 Insider Tips (http://www.customer-service-expert.com), and The Expert’s Guide to Customer Service (http://www.customer-service-expert.com/report.htm) as well as her popular complimentary ‘tips’ newsletter on How To Kick Your Customer Service Up A Notch! at http://www.HumanTechTips.com
Rosanne is also a Certified Call Center Benchmarking Auditor through Purdue University's Center for Customer Driven Quality. This certification training focuses on the access and use of key performance data to help better understand benchmarking results so as to advise on practical solutions for improvement.
For 10 years prior to starting her own organization, Rosanne had responsibility for marketing, budgeting, promoting and ultimately producing domestic and international computerized trade shows in the US, London, Belgium, and Frankfurt. She inaugurated, created, trained and directed a telemarketing on-site staff and was one of the first 150 people to attain CMP (Certified Meeting Professional) certification.
She is a columnist for TMCnet.com, Ask the Expert at supportindustry.com and The National Networker.. She represents the human element on the Advisory Board of an Italian software company, authors numerous articles for industry newsletters, and is a much sought after dynamic, vibrant, internationally prominent keynote speaker.
For more information, please visit Rosanne's TNNW Bio.
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