Your everyday service desk handles thousands of calls, emails and tweets on a daily basis – amounting to thousands of opportunities for customer insight. Insight that when harnessed can ultimately change your business.For sure, service desk analysts and operators are driven by hard metrics so listening and analysing what every customer has to say is difficult to say the least. But when approached in the right way, your Service Desk, as the frontline of your business, can be transformed into your primary source of customer insight.
IT Service Desks are staffed by IT professionals - technically proficient people. But CSAT scores across sectors are driven principally by emotional, not technical satisfaction – the expectation being that the issue will be resolved. Analysts whose technical skills are lower but with higher "soft skills" often get better Customer Satisfaction scores. Taking research from consultancy group Bain & Co, we know that the chance of repeat purchase rises from 32% to 89% if the customer feels his/her problem has been sincerely, genuinely acknowledged and then resolved. Note the word ‘feels’ in the quote – this lends itself to emotion, which if captured and understood is the most powerful way businesses can learn from their customers.
Emotional Engagement
So, it’s all about emotions is it? Well, kind of, yes! I'm not suggesting that your friendly IT service desk professional turns into an agony aunt in any way, but a halfway house between numbers and emotions gives your customers empathy and understanding.
The trick is to ask for customer feedback in real-time. Our friends at Gartner, tell us that “data collected at the point of service delivery is 40% more accurate than that gathered at a later date”. So service desks are the perfect platform for asking customers exactly how they feel.
Gathering real-time customer feedback not only allows brands to manage and measure their customer experience but also to take real-time inspired action and drive improvements. The good news is that capturing and understanding customer feedback in real-time isn't as daunting as you might think, in fact with the right technology on your side it’s easy!
Our real-time customer feedback solution is currently used by a number of service desk clients to do exactly this but I won’t bore you with a sales pitch. Rather, I think the results speak for themselves - one particularly satisfied client enjoys response rates of over 90%. They've saved millions of pounds by responding to the insight they've gathered and crucially retained a 7 figure service contract!
Not bad for a service desk…or shall we call them a Customer Insight Centre?
If you're having problems engaging your customers or improving response rates, check out our latest inforgraphic which explores 10 ways that brands like you can increase the quantity and quality of your customer feedback.
