Conversations 2007

(I Can't Get No) Customer Satisfaction

When we were kicking around ideas for this year's theme, the concept of "Satisfaction" came up time and time again.  Customer Satisfaction, a.k.a. CSAT, is certainly more than a buzzword.  Most contact centers pay at least lip service to CSAT.  Many others actively track it with customer surveys and use it to judge the effectiveness of their service.  Many self-service replacements or upgrades these days are not motivated by a desire to increase automation rates (or "containment" or "deflection"... you know, how can we stop the customer from talking to us?).  Rather, they are motivated by a reprioritized emphasis on customer satisfaction (or "first call resolution"... you know, did we actually help people?)

So I was ready to go whole hog on this one.  We'll do a whole Rolling Stones thing, with Satisfaction as the theme -- they're global, right?  Global is good!  Maybe we can get the rights to the song!  Maybe we'll have some local band covering it at one of the evening events!  I wanted Mick Jagger impersonators greeting folks on Sunday night.  I wanted the Rolling Stones lips in the Conversations logo (hey, lips are speech, right?)  I wanted the famous "na-na-NAAAAH neh NEH-nehhhh.... nah! nah!" riff playing between sessions.  I wanted a video of Keith Richards mumbling about how speech recognition has finally figured out how to understand what he was saying, with a scrolling caption transcribing: "You can't go wrong with Nuance speech technology," etc., etc.   Thankfully, I'm in charge of the content, and not the theming, and so saner minds prevailed.  We'll just have to gather some moss on our own.

In its place, our nod to CSAT this year is a breakout sessions track called "Compelling Experiences."   It's the spiritual successor to last year's "Caller Experience" track, focused on ways to improve your customer satisfaction.  I'm personally looking forward to a session titled "The Five Guiding Principles for Delivering Exceptional Phone Service" by our own Steve Springer.  All eight sessions focus either on ways to improve the customer interface, or ways to better understand how customers are interacting with your service.  The goal is to define and deliver positive service experiences for your customers with a look at best practices in interface design and performance measurement. 

In the end, customer satisfaction is not measured by theoretical greats like the best user interface or the highest automation rates.  It's directly correlated to the perception of good service.  And that is directly related to how much you actually care about your care.  If you treat customers like incoming pests that need to be warded off from your call center, then don't be surprised when people complain about your automated system, right?  This message is at the heart of this track, and really at the heart of the whole conference.  A Care 2.0 world means satisfying the increased expectations and demands of a savvy customer base who are used to getting some satisfaction when they call in.  "Your call is very important to us" doesn't cut it any more!

Published Monday, September 10, 2007 4:34 PM POST BY: Jeff Foley