The Top Five Drivers of Customer Satisfaction

Since 1997 Customer Service Benchmarking Australia (CSBA) researchers have made well over a million telephone calls to Australian organisations across the whole spectrum of industries. In recent years we have also conducted thousands of face-to-face visits and assessed numerous emails.

The focus of this work is to measure the level of customer service delivered by our clients to their customers and to advise on improvement strategies.

Since CSBA began – with a modest client-list drawn mainly from the energy, water and banking sectors – the business and the call centre industry have transformed. What we measure and how we measure it has become far more sophisticated than in those early years. CSBA is now able to pinpoint very specific areas where clients can gain a clear competitive advantage within their particular industry.

While much in the Call Centre industry has changed, certain basics remain. CSBA has identified what it considers as the five major drivers of customer satisfaction: these are the elements, some quite subtle, that determine the caller’s perception of the organisation.

The five major drivers are:

1. First call resolution: how many times did a customer call about this issue?
2. The Agent’s product knowledge.
   
3. The delay before the caller talks to an Agent.
   
4. Agent manner.
   
5. The Agent being polite and courteous.

In this edition of our Newsletter I want to focus on ‘first call resolution’.

First call resolution is listed first of the five key measures because it is the one that has the clearest cost-benefit. If more calls are resolved successfully that means fewer call backs and lower costs overall, as well as better customer satisfaction and improved Agent morale.

To achieve high-levels of first call resolution an Agent needs to question the caller to promptly and accurately identify their needs then draw upon comprehensive product/service knowledge to resolve the issue.

In CSBA’s most recent quarterly survey (of well over 200 companies) the first call resolution results ranged from 64% to 96% across nearly 20 different industries.

Within the best industry (banks, with the result of 96%), results varied between 80% and 100%. The top performers included the loan telephone lines of three of the big four banks. Banks know quite a lot about costs and these results clearly reflect that industry’s emphasis on first call resolution as best business practice.