Customer Satisfaction: December 2007

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The purpose of the Customer Feedback Survey is to facilitate a better understanding of what our customers think of the service they receive from the Customer Support Centre (CSC). Customer feedback will be utilised to identify areas for improvement within the department, it also provides a feedback mechanism on the performance of individual agents. 5766 surveys have been submitted (via email) to PlusNet customers that have called the CSC. 2.9% of the surveys were completed which represents a sample size of 0.5% of all customers that have had telephone contact with a CSC agent in the month of November. It is important to highlight these statistics in order to allow the data presented within this report to be taken in context. Although the results gathered from the survey are a random sample of customers that have spoken to a CSC agent, the results do represent a very small sample of the total calls handled within the CSC during the month. The graphs below represent a selection of the questions asked to the customers to demonstrate the differing types of feedback we receive each month. The graphs this month are the same as last month so you can see for yourself which areas are going up or down. The first graph is to show the different types of queries we receive into the CSC. Looking at the results for this month it can be seen that the number of technical calls has increased dramatically with customer service and faults call taking a drop. This could be due to the annual increase in spam and our efforts to combat this. For more information on how we are working against the spam issue please see this link. Nature of call As you can see October’s results show that only 62% of customers believed their calls were answered fast enough, this has now increased slightly to just over 62%. Not a huge increase but I'm confident that this will keep improving over the coming months. Call answered quickly One of the most important parts of a phone call is the greeting, this can set the tone for the whole call and can, in some instances, cause customers to become more relaxed or stressed. The number of customers satisfied with the greeting has increased from 88% to 89% from last month. The number unsatisfied has decreased by 2% down to a low 4.7%. Agent greeting When you call through requesting technical support or help with a billing query you need to feel as though the person helping you is confident in what they are doing. 86% of customers that completed the survey felt the agent’s level of confidence was satisfactory or above, only 7.7% thought the person dealing with their query was not as confident as they should be. While these numbers are a slight decrease on last month, they are still good indicators that the staff are handling customer queries well on the whole. Agent level of confidence Customers are at the heart of our business and the way we approach things, therefore it is important to ensure that customers are happy with the people they deal with. The next graph shows the satisfaction score given to the agents on the phones last month and as you can see it is favourable on the whole. Well we didn't quite acheive the 90% I wanted this month, however at 85.2% this is still a good rating for agent satisfaction. Overall agent rating First time fix is a big thing here at PlusNet, we’d prefer to get the customers problem resolved on the first contact rather than you having to call in multiple times. You may have seen last month there was a graph to show whether the issue was resolved on the first call, this time I’ve decided to post a graph showing how important you, the customers, think first time fix is. As you can see most customers tend to put first time fix higher than the speed of answer, working in the environment we have here is all about balance. We need to make sure that issues are dealt with on the earliest possible contact whilst also maintaining a good answer speed. First time fix A large part of the way we offer support is through our community approach and the help assistant, both of these offer huge amounts of help for customers. However each month the survey still comes back with some results showing that customers don’t know what the help assistant is, if you aren’t sure yourself have a look at http://help.plus.net to see the vast amount of different areas we cover. Now we come to what I believe is one of the most important indicators on the survey, the overall service satisfaction. It is worthwhile taking into account that this survey is only distributed to customers that call in and therefore, more often than not, it means that they have a problem or questions about their service. With all this taken into account I’m happy to say that the overall customer satisfaction score is 64.5%, this is another increase on the previous month and is a good way to end the year. Overall service I hope this blog has given a good account of how we take feedback on board, I look forward to showing you more improvements next month. Chris.