The importance of measurement
Peter Drucker famously said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This holds true for mobile operators and how customers experience their technical service. There are many network KPIs to check subscribers’ service performance, but the most direct way of knowing how they feel is, of course, to ask them.
Challenges in gathering feedback
The problem is, this may be easier said than done. To know how customers experience their service, there are different ways of getting feedback. You can send out a general survey, or after a customer has talked to support, a post-call IVR survey can be conducted, or an SMS survey sent out. Though this feedback is valuable, it comes with a few drawbacks.
Low response rate: The response rate on these surveys is generally low.
Selection bias: Many subscribers who do respond may be either very happy or extremely unhappy with the service.
Rating bias: Surveys conducted just after interacting with a customer support agent may have subscribers rating the agent’s performance rather than the actual issue.
Alternative feedback methods
You can also ask for second-hand feedback from your support agents. This is often really valuable but may be difficult to scale consistently, as it depends on the experience of different agents. To better scale this, some companies use voice/text analysis to get insights from every customer interaction and categorize potential problems.
The silent majority
You can also ask for second-hand feedback from your support agents. This is often really valuable. It may however be difficult to scale and still be consistent since it depends on e.g. the experience of the different agents. To better scale this, there are different companies doing cool things with voice/text analysis to get insights from every customer interaction and categorize potential problems.
But this doesn’t address yet another factor: far from everyone experiencing technical problems actually reaches out to customer support. In fact, we’ve previously found that 98.5% do not. So how do we know when they are dissatisfied?
Enhancing engagement through Self-Care
By offering customers an easier way to engage with you. One approach is to provide self-care, where subscribers themselves can analyze their service performance without needing to reach out to an agent. This lowers the threshold to check an issue while the analyses themselves serve as feedback on how the service is working. And it can indeed make customers more engaged. One of our customers now has 75% of their technical claims coming from self-care rather than by phone. This high percentage is not mainly because phone calls to support have dropped (though they have), but because the support interactions have increased significantly.
Benefits of increased interaction volume
Increasing the volume of interactions has intrinsic value since you get more feedback. There’s also extra information to glean from the metadata from technical self-care. It makes it easier to automatically pick up and flag clusters of issues rather than just individual experiences. For instance, many subscribers may have issues in a specific geographic area, or perhaps a phone running on certain software is starting to experience problems. Real-time insights from these types of data can be valuable for customer support and operations, where clustered issue updates presented in the NOC/SOC provide an overview of current service experiences.
Challenges and Considerations
Self-care is an opportunity for better customer feedback, but it doesn’t come without its own challenges:
Value and Expectations: It’s critical for the self-care service to bring actual value to the customer and set the right expectations. If troubleshooting rarely finds issues or keeps giving generic answers, subscribers will likely leave even more annoyed and never try it again.
Internal Trust: Internally, analyzing aggregated data must be accurate. If your system draws incorrect conclusions and starts flagging false positives, trust in the system will quickly diminish and take time to rebuild.
The potential of Self-Care
When done right, self-care can significantly increase the amount of customer feedback you receive. This will help you keep better track of your customers’ service experience and may even help you unveil a few new, surprising insights.
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