|
Performance Benchmarking for Utility Call Centers |
| Overview | As utility customers become more sophisticated, they display ever higher expectations for their call center interactions. That makes it imperative for decision makers to understand what’s important to a customer on a given call, how well they are delivering on the customer’s expectations, and how well they compare to others.
Resources are scarce, and so the goal should be to optimize, not simply maximize service levels. What’s more, this makes comparisons to other utilities, nationwide averages, and “best-in-class” performers become important to your firms’ improvement. | TRC is conducting a nationwide study of customer call center perceptions. The aim is to give participating utilities insight into how customers view their people, processes, and procedures – the fabric of any call experience.
The end goal: gather data and compare findings across companies to determine which issues most directly affect customer satisfaction. | |
| | Study Benefits: | Results from our study will provide both strategic and tactical insights for company decision makers.
Senior Utility Executives
Executives will get insights to support the setting of overall customer care goals, and to help them allocate scarce improvement resources. What's more they will come away with a clearer understanding of how call center performance can impact customer perceptions of the company. | Call Center Managers
Those who run customer care operations will get analysis and modeling to identify what drives call center transaction satisfaction. And, they will be better able to pinpoint areas of specific improvement and manage critical and emerging issues. | |
| | Key areas of analytic focus: | TRC's study will offer utilities a thorough and convenient means of tracking and benchmarking call center performance as experienced by residential customers. Our year-round surveying, quarterly reporting, and annual modeling of customers' call experiences will serve the following analyses.
- Assessment of a comprehensive set of attributes associated with call center interactions across five different call types: electric outage, new connects/transfers, high bill complaint calls, billing inquires, and payment arrangement calls.
- The linkage of customers’ overall call satisfaction with participating utilties' available call center performance metrics.
|  - Determination of which attributes actually drive call satisfaction through the development of clear models. These models will illustrate the relationships between critical call center service attributes and overall call satisfaction.
- Understanding of the relative importance of each key driver on customer satisfaction for each call type studied along with each subscriber’s performance across these drivers.
- A critical evaluation of each the firm’s call center performance so as to support critical decision making by call center management.
| |
| | Research Methodology: | - An 8-10 minute telephone interview, administered to a sample of each subscriber’s residential customers who have recently had a call center transaction.
- A survey instrument that will address a comprehensive set of attributes, including those related to the IVR/VRU, CSR skills and behaviors, issue handling, and issue resolution.
- Residential customer sample will be provided by participating utilities. Good record quality will be important to ensure reliable results. Sample files should include customer name, phone number, and call type code.
| - TRC will perform all survey development, testing, and fielding - including extensive quality assurance activities. Upon the conclusion of each quarter TRC will produce tabular analyses of the results.
- TRC will also conduct advanced statistical modeling using Satiscan™ - our proprietary tool for pinpointing critical and sometimes hidden drivers of satisfaction. In all six models will be built - one for each major transaction type.
- Quarterly, TRC will evaluate survey results, tabulated findings, and transaction type models and produce reports by participating company, to include competitive benchmarking.
Note - All individual subscriber data and results will be coded to ensure individual company confidentiality as well as the confidentiality of subscriber customers. | |
| Summarizing Project Deliverables:
- Up-front discussion of any unique issues with TRC senior project staff.
- A comprehensive evaluation of new connect or service transfers, service interruption, billing inquiry, billing complaint, payment arrangements and "other" types of calls.
- Quarterly report cards of call performance and a clear summary of findings.
| - Annual Satiscan™ modeling of call satisfactions drivers by call type, associated reporting and discussion of your results with your customer care organization.
Other Services:
Some subscribers may wish to conduct additional surveys or add questions to the core project survey. These services will be priced based upon subscriber-specific needs. | |
|
