When two powerful but opposing forces converge, you can expect the conflict to be significant. That’s the
pressure most support managers experience when attempting to achieve world-class customer satisfaction
(C-SAT) scores while driving expenses down. Wouldn’t it be easy if we had unlimited headcount and no
budget constraints? Most of the things that we traditionally think of as driving up customer satisfaction—such
as shorter hold times and quicker case resolution—are costly.
On the surface, at least, it seems that “more headcount” is required to provide better service levels, right? Put more people on the phones or answering the e-mails, and we can shorten the response time. Reduce the caseload per engineer and allow them more time to work on each issue, and they will turn them around quicker. It’s simple—but expensive!
Most support managers are expected to maintain or improve C-SAT scores while becoming increasingly
efficient. Execs want to see expense ratios decline and rightly so as they are in the business of making money not losing it. After all, shouldn’t we get some economy of scale? In other words, “Do more with less.” This may appear to be a no-win situation, but there actually is a way to achieve both goals. There is a common denominator that can be leveraged to simultaneously drive customer satisfaction up while driving operating expenses down. I believe that we are at a critical cross-roads today than never before in our lifetimes.
First, let’s talk about the primary drivers of customer satisfaction. Sure, there are a lot of things that have an
effect on C-SAT, and most support centers measure these factors in their surveys. This includes the agent’s
professionalism, technical knowledge, and so on. But the three key drivers—those that have the largest
overall impact—are response time, resolve time, and status updates. There is a correlation to these metrics.
Response time is defined as “the time it takes for a customer to get through to a qualified person (someone
that is going to attempt to resolve the issue).” Resolve time is “the time it takes for a customer to get the
issue resolved to their satisfaction.” The third item, status updates, means keeping customers informed of
progress on their open (unresolved) issues. These are the top three priorities (in that order), and everything
else is secondary. Once I learned this correlation, everything else in running my center became easier!
For most companies, resolve time is the number one opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. I say that
because most companies recognize that service level is critical, and therefore they do a reasonable job in
that area. By the way, if that’s not true at your company—fix that first (before you tackle resolution). The third item, status updates, only comes into play when you don’t resolve on the initial contact—and you really want to minimize these situations. Therefore, resolve time is usually the area with the most potential for
improvement. All of these come together with the creativity, innovation and inspiration of your staff and that is where the magic happens. I am confident that as much as things get complex in our industry, there are some foundational principles that still hold true today than it did a decade or so ago. These are indeed exciting times for our industry, our partners and suppliers and more importantly our customers!
