Confero Blog

Listening to Employee Telephone Calls: How Do Multiple Employees Approach the Same Customer Inquiry?

by Elaine Buxton

Listening to employee phone calls allows you to imagine yourself as the customer and hear firsthand how your employees interact. Many times managers of front line employees would like to listen to employee conversations but don’t always have the capability to do so. Other times, managers have monitoring capabilities but must listen for hours to hear how multiple employees approach the same inquiry.

One way to gain this capability is to consider audio recorded telephone mystery shops, which offer the following potential advantages:

Listen and evaluate employee and customer comments in their own voices, for a realistic idea of what your customer’s experience sounds like.
Recognize inconsistent telephone approaches among employees in order to move toward more uniform customer service delivery.
Identify areas where employees may have missed a sales opportunity.
Recognize employees for meeting/exceeding company expectations in customer service via the phone.
Pinpoint areas where employees may have used a more effective approach to resolve a customer issue.
Train other employees by reviewing a “perfect” phone shop, in order to show them a strong example of excellent phone interaction with a customer.

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Five Benefits of an Ongoing Customer Service Mystery Shopping Program

by Elaine Buxton

Customer service is about selling: selling the right product to the right customer in the right place at the right time. Many factors will determine customer service and, therefore, many factors have an impact on sales. In today’s challenging economic environment, many companies have fewer customers so they must sell more to the customers they do have.

Customer service is a people issue. Mystery shopping reports help companies manage the people component of customer service. Keeping customers consistently happy with your company so that they continue to do business with you is a difficult challenge. Here are five (5) key benefits of an ongoing customer service mystery shopping program:

1. Shops provide an objective basis for ongoing rewards and coaching in customer service.Ongoing mystery shops allow you to reward high performers while working with lower performers to raise their customer service skills.

2. Measure employee customer service skills over time. Mystery shop reports show you at a glance how an employee performs over a given time frame. You can also compare results among employees of similar experience levels to assess training needs.

3. Identify trends among employee groups. Are employees in some geographic areas or within certain job types more likely to provide excellent service? If so, you can take a look at what factors positively impact those situations and work to recreate that success in other lower performing parts of your business.

4. Address challenges of high turnover or morale. As management and other staff move in and out of your company, constant measurement allows for continuous monitoring of customer service levels, both with new and experienced staff members.

5. Sell more products and services to your customers. Serving customers well requires being fully engaged with them. When employees pay attention to customers by serving them well, they also learn of opportunities to suggestively sell additional products and services.

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Confero, Inc. Named To Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Privately-Held Companies in America

by Confero Inc.

CARY, N.C.—Elaine Buxton, president of Confero, Inc., (www.conferoinc.com), has announced that the national customer experience measurement firm has been recognized by Inc. magazine as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies.

The 2009 Inc. 5000 is a list of the nation’s top 5,000 fastest-growing businesses based on revenue growth from 2005 through 2008, and represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. During the three (3) year period beginning in 2005, Confero has experienced

Customer Wait Times: Ideas to Make the Wait More Pleasant

by Confero Inc.

The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik (“The Numbers Guy”) talked with our own Rob Barry, along with other experts, about the customer view of time spent waiting in line.

Rob knows a thing or two about wait times. He has worked with our grocery store clients to measure customer experience for the past six (6) years. As Rob stated to Carl, “Grocery stores are focusing more on quickness of checkout probably than ever before. Society has created an environment where everyone is in a hurry.”

In his August 18, 2009 blog The Waiting Game, Bialik digs into the art, science and numbers behind “queuing”, “standing in line” and “standing on line”.

Is customer waiting time about math or perception…or both? Thanks, Carl, for a fascinating look at waiting!

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Mystery Shopper Invoice Payments will be issued 8/25/09

by Confero Inc.

As you know, Confero, Inc. issues shopper invoice payments each month on or about the 25th for all shops conducted during the previous month. Payments scheduled to be issued on 8/25 are now showing on your Confero Compass Shopper Log as “Pending”. Payments will be issued in the evening, following close of business.

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