How do you overcome poor the customer service experience from offshore customer facing call centre operations?
Our client had moved substantial customer facing call centre operations offshore and had reduced its labour costs by over 65%.
However the customer experience had worsened dramatically. Our client uses the ‘Net Promoter Index’ concept to track and manage the quality of the “customer experience” it delivers.
Essentially the ‘Net Promoter Index’ (NPI) measures your customer experience quality by taking the percentage of people who loved the experience of dealing with you (scoring 9 or 10 out of 10) and subtracting the % of people who didn’t enjoy your service experience (scores 0 to 5 out of 10). Middle scores are ignored as analysis has shown they are not predictive of future purchasing or customer loyalty behaviour.
We worked with the client to determine the primary root causes of low ‘customer experience scores’. The primary root causes were found to be poor telephone call quality due to technical problems with its IP (Internet Protocol) telephony infrastructure and poor language and communications skills from many call agents.
We helped our client implement short-term and longer improvements to its telephony infrastructure and addressed the poor language skills through more effective communications training. We helped the client drive rapid performance improvements by breaking down the customer experience scores by call centre, team and call type. This allowed our client to identify troublesome call types which needed to be addressed and poorly performing supervisors and coaches.
The end result was that the client’s customer experience scores of its offshore call centres improved dramatically (from a “Net Promoter Index score below -30 to Positive within 120 days) whilst retaining the 65% cost advantages of ‘offshoring’.