February 2023 Closed Workshop

Customers are often unaware of the internal processes used by companies. These processes are indeed rarely deemed of interest by customers when contacting a company’s customer service.

Like many other companies, this energy provider makes use of various norms, processes and quality checks. As a result, there may be a very significant gap between internally designed customer journeys and customer expectations; hence the requirement to listen to the customers’ actual expression in order to assess their interests and expectations.

The use of KPIs and numerical data still features prominently within companies. Feedback tells us that a good way to showcase the importance of verbatim is to use them to kick off presentations, be it in front of collaborators, managers, directors, supervisors or the steering committee…

Selecting a few verbatim, either funny, emotional, intricate, or even mysterious, can thus allow to set the tone and the goal of a presentation.

This telecom company had set up automatic customer follow-up actions whenever a given grade ranged from 0 to 3, yet did not consider the associated verbatim. The opportunity to detect churn risk within verbatim enables a more precise assessment of which customers need to be called back.
Going beyond the preconception which states that a bad grade necessarily implies a dissastisfied customer and taking into account the actual customer sentiment allow directing phone calls towards customers whose situation should warrant actions.
The results are clear: the costs linked to the outgoing phone calls (now less frequent and more efficiently targeted) starkly decreased while on the other hand the customer retention rate increased.

In the case of this energy provider, top management was convinced that ultra-detractors (grades ranging from 0 to 3) implied intricate cases, involving customers which had already contacted their customer service several times. However, a deep-dive into these “ultra-detractors” cases revealed that these two preconceptions were wrong, and that 80% of these cases were in fact rather easy to manage (e.g. updating contact details).