Why is an Agent's Performance Crucial to Success?
Regardless of the industry of the business, nothing is more important than providing exceptional customer service. An American Express survey found that more than half of respondents have cancelled a subscription or planned purchase because of poor customer service and one-third of them would switch to a competitor if they have better service. This level of competition incentivizes businesses to strive to better answer the question of how they can improve customer satisfaction.
However, the subjectivity of what exceptional service means can often make it difficult to ensure consistency in customer service interactions across all agents. It requires regular feedback and insights to shape and mold criteria to act as the basis for positive experiences that meet the rising expectations of customers. A company can never truly understand what a customer wants by relying on customer satisfaction surveys and can rarely redeem themselves if a customer is unsatisfied; one survey showed that 52% of customers left without giving the company any warning. This is where customer service scorecards can be a game-changer for businesses.
Implementing Scorecards for Your Customer Service Team
Customer service teams need scorecards to measure what the business deems to be important in a customer interaction from objectives such as building rapport with a customer, to time it takes to complete a ticket, to proper procedures being followed for different types of customer inquiries. Using internal guidelines to measure against agent individual performance and the effectiveness of current procedures can turn data into key insights that will improve customer service substantially. Agent scorecards can act as a way to align the business’ goals with customer interaction expectations. It is a transparent way to ensure the team knows what they need to do to create a consistent and excellent customer experience every time.
The first step in creating an agent scorecard is to determine the objectives the scorecard will achieve. For customer service teams, tone of voice and speed of service might be key differentiators. Using key performance measures such as CSAT (customer satisfaction), NPS (net promoter score), or CES (customer effort score) can determine customer pain points. With scorecards, feedback can become more streamlined because of the scorecard’s ability to provide measurable data and examples to highlight where agents are doing well and where the room for improvement might be.
Maintaining internal quality standards through the use of agent scorecards can improve the customer experience, align these interactions with business goals, fill in training gaps, or develop more effective processes. Our team at Pontem has worked with customer service teams to develop digital scorecards and lay a foundation for better customer interactions and in turn, better retention and growth. Contact Pontem for a demo of our agent scorecard and to start building your solution today.