Most companies don’t take a proactive approach when it comes to monitoring their contact centers to ensure high-quality customer experiences, according to a LinkedIn survey of 1,000 international technical professionals conducted by Empirix.
The survey found that 20% of companies adding new technology to their customer contact centers either wait for customers to complain, pray, or only pay attention if it’s a major upgrade. The survey, conducted earlier this summer, asked managers and executives across multiple industries how they assure high-quality customer experiences in contact centers as they enhance telephony, information systems, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
The responses revealed that few companies invest in technology to proactively identify problems with customer service systems, or to preempt them in the first place.
Most companies (62%) test upgrades manually by having employees randomly evaluate different aspects of performance; only 18% use automated testing, which provides the most consistent and reliable intelligence.
What’s more, 68% of companies surveyed never test the voice quality in their contact centers. Poor voice quality forces service representatives to repeat themselves or, in extreme cases, ask customers to hang up and call again, the survey said.
This lack of pre-deployment testing and ongoing monitoring can reduce the returns on companies’ investments in customer service technology, according to Empirix. Systems that drop calls, deliver the wrong information to customer service representatives, route calls incorrectly, or provide poor voice quality force reps to spend more time resolving each issue and adding unnecessary cost to each interaction. More importantly, when severe, these problems can lead to churn.
“The survey identified a huge disconnect between investing in customer service technology and knowing how to realize the maximum return on that investment,” Tim Moynihan, Vice President of Marketing at Empirix, said in the survey press release. “Companies are committing significant sums to purchasing the hardware and software, but they’re not viewing quality assurance as part of the equation. There seems to be a lot of talk about superior customer service, but this survey shows an inconsistent approach to testing and monitoring these systems.”
On the bright side, the survey results were more encouraging for contact center monitoring, with 31% of companies investing in monitoring technology to keep their customer service systems running smoothly. Still, the largest percentage (45%) use manual methods.
“Manual testing at least shows that the company is trying,” Moynihan added. “But it’s not a good use of peoples’ time and it’s usually a one-shot deal. It doesn’t provide a broad view of when and how problems might occur, especially when systems are subjected to a realistic number of users. Automated testing can validate the system thoroughly, from end to end, but few companies use it.”