What Are The Issues Currently Affecting Your Call Centre?

They could be:
Handling increased numbers of calls
Staff retention
Customer retention.
Call resolution
The impact of a new automated phone system

Whether to offshore your operations abroad

Whatever sector you are in many of the issues facing call centres remain the same and ultimately as research from the States has recently confirmed, consumers are much less likely to buy a company's products if they have a poor experience when calling that company's call centre for help.

This is where Link Information Technology can help.

Praveen Dixit and his Team have extensive experience of researching the service provided by call centres. Between us we have researched the service provided by call centres for amongst others:
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Speed is of the essence - it is important to interview customers as soon as possible after they have called you - how easy is it for you to remember in detail a conversation you had a few weeks ago, unless the service you received was exceptionally good or poor?

Make sure your research consultants understand your business and how you operate your call centre - invite them in for a few hours to meet the staff and listen to a few calls. It makes for a better piece of research and more fitting recommendations.

Measure expectations as well as customers perceptions of the service they have received. This is where a trade off technique such as SIMALTO (Simultaneous Multi Attribute Level Trade Off) works so well. By using verbal scales such as the one illustrated below you can see that although your customers perceive your staff to be friendly and polite, they want to be treated in a way that makes them believe you value their custom.

Service attribute

Attitude of staff:

They were rude and couldn't wait to get me off the phone

They treated me as a number not as a person

They were friendly and polite

They treated me like a valued customer

Measure customer priorities - does it matter that it took 2 minutes to get through to an operator if they managed to resolve your query there and then?

.Ask your consultant if they offer a fax or email alert system - if a customer being interviewed is obviously very dissatisfied with the service they have recently received from you, arrange for the research company to send their details back to you. You can then arrange for a manager to call them. It may save you losing a valued customer in the long run.

.Researching your customers may only be tackling one side of the story. It often pays to conduct staff research as well. You could well uncover a pressing staff training eed, a problem with staff motivation which is affecting the tone of the calls or a number of other issues which would not come to light if you only spoke to customers.

Conduct some qualitative research - it may be that customers have a problem with a particular part of your IVR system or music they have to listen to which would not surface with quantitative research.

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Pemex Consultancy Complaints

What Are The Issues Currently Affecting Your Call Centre?After a number of years of high levels of consumer spending, retailers are now facing a period of tough trading conditions.Are you looking for ways to retain customers or their levels of spending?Do you want to know more about your customer base and their spending habits?Do you want to know how shoppers view your brand and your competitors.Do you know how satisfied your customers are with you?Do you want to expand your internet offer?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions it is likely that you will be looking to conduct some market research. Ali and Danny Sims of DJS Research have nearly 20 years experience in the retail sector.

Our Experience

Our experience is made up of projects we have done at DJS Research and when we were at Wirthlin Europe (now HI Europe) and consist of a mix of home shopping and high street market research. Home shopping clients we have worked for (either for DJS or previously) are ShopDirect, Littlewoods, Index,Grattan and KaleidoscopeHigh street stores we have worked for include Littlewoods, Index, Iceland, Marksand Spencer and Topps Tiles.We have also conducted work for a couple of centres who wanted to profile their visitors and their opinions of the services provided. Here are some examples of the types of research we have conducted:

Case Study 1: Clothing Research For Major UK Retailer

A major high street store wanted to conduct some research into their mens, ladieswear and lingerie. They commissioned extensive qualitative and quantitative research to do this.
The research was made up of:
Workshops with staff and consumers to explore what customers are looking for in a quality product versus what those working on the products think is important.Accompanied depth interviews - we accompanied consumers as they shopped for clothes with our client and at competitor stores. We watched how they interacted with the items in store, what displays attracted them and what turned them off.Intercepts and observation - short 10 to 15 minute interviews in store plus observation.Focus groups - we discussed items of clothing provided by our client and items brought along by respondents.

Quantiative research

Case Study 2: Customer Profiling Exercise For Home Shopping Company

Qualitative research with shoppers of a home shopping title aimed at those who have difficulty getting credit. The groups explored their lifestyles, shopping habits, spending and saving habits (if any), how they budget for big occasions like Christmas. We then looked at how the title could better meet their needs. In addition we accompanied their money collectors on their rounds and discussed what they perceive customers need and any improvements to the way they would like to be treated by the home shopping company.

Case Study 3: Customer Satisfaction Research For a High Street Store

This was an ongoing quantitative piece of research which involved exit interviews with customers across a representative spread of stores. Customers were interviewed for 10 minutes on leaving the store about their shopping experience and the service they had received.

Case Study 4: Profiling Exercise For a Localised Shopping Centre

Short quantitative face to face interviews were conducted with visitors to a shopping centre to profile them in terms of socio demographics, where they lived, how they travelled to the centre and their opinions of the centre facilities.In addition to the above we have also conducted branding research, product research; research into catalogues (layout, content, covers etc) and advertising research in the retail sector.We will leave the final word to a couple of our retail clients:

"Despite DJS being based far away from the survey site we received a high quality service that met our objectives exactly"

"We were very pleased with the way the survey was conducted, it was done in a very professional manner and we felt that the staff cared about what they were doing and were genuinely interested in the future of the company."

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