The Survey Delusion: Why NPS and CSAT Are Failing Your Call Center

00:00Tom Laird here. You've heard, breakdown, I can help you with things This is advice from, from a call center geek, a weekly podcast, with a focus on all things call center. Covered all from call center operations, hiring, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of the customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Lear. What's up everybody welcome to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center contact center podcast We try to give you some actionable California it's been a little crazy, but you know it's it's really cool when you have a contact center that actually You know it's cool what that we're selling things, and it's cool that we're servicing But when you can really really help people to there's a there's a huge bonus in that and in the auto world in the auto QA world We're you know you know probably doing about two to three demos a day words getting out So really excited with everything that we're doing on kind of both our our business units here But I wanted to kind of take some time today to talk about something that I think bridges quality and your contact center, right?

02:10And that's talking about kind of some of these service metrics, specifically NPS, Net Promoter Scoring in CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Scoring. You know, for a really long time, these have been the staples. I have been a huge advocate, especially, you know, I think the first time 2014-15-16, know, I was really an advocate for NPS. I think, you know, when I saw that most contact centers were focusing on core telephony KPIs, that was a metric that I. Hey, man, this thing expands, this thing goes to actual what the customers are feeling. But But then I think it morphed into something that it wasn't. And I think we tried to make too much out of it. And the... the I think it morphed into to something that it wasn't. And I think we tried and I think we tried to make too much out of it. And, and I think that the the survey craze has insane that we're peppered with surveys and after call surveys andiasco surveys and hey will you stay on the line for this survey that nobody really does them anymore they're annoyed with them and I think there's multiple reasons for that number one is most companies aren't using them right they'll do surveys to check the box so that when the the CEO or the CMO says hey how are we doing with our NPS we say oh we're doing this and here's our score. But when they kind of try to correlate that to churn, or where they try to correlate that to revenues, or even agent behaviors, right, a lot of that doesn't make it back into where it needs to go. And now I would even argue that it shouldn't, because I would argue that a lot of the scoring now is misleading, it's misleading number one, because, as we're going to discuss really the small percentage of customers that actually take, the survey. And number two, that data is skewed. So not only do you have a really small percentage of customers taking a survey, you have data that is skewed from customers that really are just kind of I call, I always call it the two poles, right? The, the people who are really, really happy or really, really irritated. And you miss all these people in the middle, right? So, and the other thing We use this for agent behaviors and we use this to score our contact center when sometimes it has absolutely, nothing to do with that.

04:31How many times, right, right? Have you had a quality score of an agent, that, that was high. You took and saw their survey for that score that was. Extremely low from. from the customer standpoint. Now there's other issues with that as well. It's policies, procedures of your business I'm just, to be honest, I've been beat up a lot in the BPO space by customers who really focus on NPS, and then you. You present so much data to them to be like, guys, here's what's really happening in your contact center. We're using advanced analytics. We're using OttoQA. We're getting all of this. Data.

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05:46So I want to talk about a So I want to talk about a new way forward today here at the end, but let's go down to some of the things that I said. Now, I just did a LinkedIn newsletter, so if you want to kind of look at some of the stuff there after this, I a post the link deeper and kind of some of the things I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about. But according to just listen to some of about your policies based on a very small percentage of customers, right? 95% of your, your customers do not respond to this, right? And we just forget about those guys, right? I think that's, that's a, that's a huge issue, right? And this is down, like according to CXA, down 15 to 20 percent, that's a couple just one out of every 20 customers to shape our service decisions, right?

07:29So again, not hearing close to the full story of what we're doing. base is silent. The feedback trends again are small. It's an unrepresented group. And again, there's so much, there's so much, the data aspect, glared. So we all know this, right? The, the extremes are the loudest, right? Anything that's good in your call center, right? An agent gets a gets a really good sale or they have a somebody on the line and said, Hey, give me a supervisor. You are awesome, right? We shout that to the rooftops, right? It's loud, right? Customers, do that too. They shout from the rooftops when they have good experiences? Not could mean multiple things. Could mean an unbelievably great agent experience. It could mean... Your policies amazing, right? Maybe the agents stunk, but your policies, they're happy with the outcome. Right? So many variables into that, but also the ticked off and it's more the you will see more irritated customers that will fill out after call surveys because that's their only outlet to do that.

08:46Now I like what I have some kind of stats from call center helper here, right? Call Center Hel, helper notes that the most likely to complete a I the happiest or angriest of responses with very few moderates, in the middle, right? And again, that's the distortion of our data. So again, one out of every 20 customers we're listening to, and then those customers are probably really happy or really mad. There's nothing in the middle. We don't get a really good view about what is happening. Now, again, we're talking about, after call, NPS, and and CSAT services. So if you have an overall service where you're looking at analytics, you're looking at sentiment, you're using this as a piece of the pie, I'm probably okay with that, right? Not that you're asking me, right? But so many don't,t most of you do because you don't, right? I

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10:39And for those I actually do, because it's a pain in the rear, right? You're not going to take the time to write for paragraphs. choosing something as fast as they can. So, again. You don't know the root for these poor experience. You don't know what actually made the customer happy if they're really happy with it, right? And you, you don't know what policies, per se, what the overall is, right? So I think, again, I think it's a metric that was really good at the time. I I think it is, is run its course. And, I think that now there are, there's some better things that we can do, to get our overall CS

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12:01They know how to do anything at any time, right? So if agents for high scores or selective, or to be extremely selective in a kind of who they know is going to do these surveys, or they kind of fudge what happens. How many times in your organization have you sent an after-call server and I see this all the If you're thinking about scoring as, from a 6 to an 8, a 6 to a 7, understand that an eight is much better or nine is much better, right? Like, it almost tries to skew the results, which I don't know why, maybe if you're going against some type of benchmarking for an industry, right? But again, to have employees kind of feel pressured to coach, to coach customers, because that happens a lot. Give high scores. Again, what are we doing? What's the whole point of this? Is? Is it I don't know if you need to go through all of this deal because they become inescapable, I like that.

13:55Right. You can't escape them, right? They're just gonna be there and you just, you don't care, right? You don't care. And the last reason, which the last b Which I think is something I didn't think about until I kind of did some some research more into this topic was topic was, you know, I like this according to Gartner, 95% of companies collect feedback, right, in some shape or form, right? So, that, so that's really good, but only 33% use it to drive improved, and just 5% close the loop and tell customers what changed as a result of them even giving feedback. Right, so you want to do, you want to do NPS, right? Start to take that data, start to to respond back to your customers. Hey, thank you for this-feedback, we actually made these improvements. We did this, nobody's doing doing that, right? Again, they're just collecting data for the sake of collecting data, and we don't see improvement And they see the same thing over and over when they call.

14:56Why are they going to continue to give that same feedback? They're not. They're just going to blow it off. Right? So again, I think that's a, that's my case, my entire case, right, of the why I think NPS and C said have run their course, right. Nobody responds to it. The ones that do, it is skewed. We don't use the feedback anyway, right, because the feedback is most of the time, we're not even asking the right questions. I'm not even sure, you know, what. That customer's really maybe ticked off or really happy about, depending on what type of feedback they're actually giving. Right? Is it an agent issue? Is it a policy issue? Um, so I think there that we can actually utilize and see. Now, I stopped becoming an NPS promoter, I guess, probably around 2018, 2019. Definitely COVID. And that was when CXone really came out hard and with analytics.

16:08So interaction analytics totally opened my eyes to see and again, this is not a interaction analytics video. this is any type of analytics platform. The reason was is because I could get real time, meaning within a couple hours at the time, right? When it first came out, I could get customer and agent sentiment scores based on keywords that were being said. So I could get and see what agents were doing. Were they using proper tone, word usage? Was that actually having an impact in the experience that the customer had? Because I could then track down to the interaction what that experience was. So for me, it was much, Oh, I guess easier, number one, but two, more useful to drill into this. You guys have heard multiple videos that I've done that we have for years now incentivized our agents, right, based on sentiment scores, right.

17:15We are, we're paying them more, right, based on, right, looking at how they're talking to customers. Especially, there's no cross-sell, there's no up-up a sell, right, on a program, a core customer service program, where you're really just helping, and a lot of those don't exist anymore, but prospective they're still there. And, again, even if they're not, Even if you're It was a refund, right? So you started to be able to tie in together, the behaviors, and what the customer was happy, what the customer was not happy with, based on what they were saying. That's way more powerful than NPS. We just don't like it because it was harder to score a right Right? And so then everybody loves the benchmark stuff, which I think is the most useless thing in the world. I've done videos on that. So we can't benchmark it. Who cares? and we know directly in our contact center what is the, affecting our customers the most, right?

18:45Affecting them from a negative standpoint, what are the actual keywords and how are the agents handling it That's number I. Right, there, is that, that's still better for me than CSED and NPS, but with what we've done with OttoQA, and again, I don't want to make this a sales thing for Otto, because this is more I don't know, I that's saying we've perfected it, but I feel really comfortable in our numbers. We've taken, you know, over the last and meaning, every single time a customer were scoring a call with auto QA, we have gotten to the point now where we can give a NPS and a CSAT prediction score of that specific interaction and then start to build the entire frivol of the entire customer base. So you're looking now, not just at the 5%, happy and the mad, but you're looking at everyone, right. A lot of times, there's a lot of fives and sixes, right, right in the middle. There's a lot of times where there's not a, that really, really happens on the call. That's okay, right, right. We're really just starting to look at the overall contact center, the overall, um, scoring, and the overall experience that the customer is having. So we're taking analytics and we're adding into AI.

20:35and we're getting much better results and much better feedback, right? If we take those two things together, then we get from sending it a 5% after call survey. the and I

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21:26And that's real evolution that we're waiting for is true voice, right? No trans, right? when we sign the transcript, there's some kind kind of analysis analysis that gets done there. You know, the true meaning of this and it will blow through the roof, when we get true, true voice. But still, I believe that it is better, right, in looking at, you know, say you're doing, I don't know, four to five thousand calls per month you're scoring, and to get a CSAT and NPS score on all of those calls, right, that correlates to even the ones that did do surveys. Look at that. Dude, it's crazy powerful. And again, you really want to know what's happened to your call center, start using AI with it. That's going to be the real tell for you. So again, I still think even if you want to go old school, you don't want to use a technology, I'd rather go look on Facebook, and I get all that but I just think, you know, a modern C-X strategy has to be built on really the full, you know, journey that there's a lot to change here. The beginning of it's there. I mean, we're doing it every single day with customers mean, you don't even pay extra for it. Like, I think it's that important that customers need to see that. And then when they start to calibrate it and kind of correlate it to their, their surveys, but they're like, Oh, my God, Tom, this is, yeah, dude, this is really good. So. So again, hopefully, that gives a little bit of, I don't know, insights. I'm not here to kind of totally change people's minds because I know that there's a lot of people that they put out on the NPS and the CSAT and they are tying it to other metrics.

24:05But for the vast majority of organizations, this is a the cheaper, easier and way better outcome then you And then you're gonna get with just, you Again if you have anything let me know more than happy to answer hit me up afterward just DM me and And I am more a than happy to show you. I'd love to show you a demo of auto. I have a couple videos just on the CSAT as well if you guys ever wanna check that out. All right, appreciate you all. Hopefully this gig got some insights. I was pretty excited to do this one. I'm pretty passionate about this and I think it one of the is totally overhauling something that, that we've done in the industry for a long time. And I'm just really trying to get the word out. Thanks, guys.