What Cable Providers Can Teach Your Business About Customer Service

When it comes to delivering excellent customer service, most people would say the cable industry isn’t exactly a shining example of customer satisfaction.

Historically, their reputation in this arena has been acceptable at best, and more often described as “nightmarish.” So if you’re wondering what you could possibly learn from reading this—don’t worry, I’ll explain.

While it’s true that cable providers have had their problems in the past, the latest Telecommunications Report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) tells us that customer opinion for some of these companies is actually on the rise. According to the report, customer satisfaction scores for Comcast, the largest Internet and cable service provider in the U.S., rose 15 percent between 2015 and 2016—from a 54 to a 62 out of a possible 100. Comcast’s improvement was second only to Time Warner Cable, which rose 16 percentage points from a 51 to a 59. In addition, Comcast reported its largest first-quarter gain in subscription TV customers in nine years. How did they do it? By making a significant investment in customer service technology.

Having the tools to effectively listen to and better serve your customers is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a need-to-have—and that’s the case for all industries. More and more experts agree that customer experience is an organization’s only true competitive differentiator. A major component of that is the customer service provided by contact center agents.

Calabrio ONE customers have known this all along, and they know that having the right technology in place allows them to:

1. Identify conversational flags
   

   Interactions may remain calm, yet still be classified as a negative. By identifying conversational flags such as talk over events, organizations can further investigate these interactions and gain a better understanding of their agents’ behavior during customer interactions.

2. Quantify interactions
   

   Agents learn techniques to help retain customers, such as redirection and answering questions with a question. Unfortunately, these techniques can backfire and lead to negative interactions when an agent is overly persistent. Contact center speech analytics software can quantify speech hits and provide more visibility into how often a phrase or question is repeated.

3. Evaluate quality interactions

   The right software allows quality evaluators to identify the most relevant interactions through simple yet powerful speech analytics technology. For example, evaluators can target interactions in which a customer says, “Why won’t you cancel my service?” Conversely, evaluators can also search for phrases that were not said, to measure the quality of agent performance against scripts or policies.

4. Go the extra mile
   

   Beyond providing sophisticated contact center management software, Calabrio also works directly with organizations to develop strategies for improving customer retention and customer service. One example is our Vision Workshops, which equip organizations with customer-centric strategies, tools and techniques based on best practices developed by leading workforce optimization practitioners and industry experts.

While companies like Comcast may still have a way to go on the grand scale of customer satisfaction, their leap in the right direction is a true testament to how powerful customer service technology can be, and why every business should be devoting resources to the right contact center management software.

Learn more about how voice-of-the-customer analytics is helping organizations improve customer satisfaction.

Brad Snedeker

Brad Snedeker is the Director of Customer Advocacy at Calabrio. With over 15 years in the industry, Brad has extensive knowledge of the contact center space. As Calabrio’s head of the Innovation Center, he works directly with users to teach and develop new and innovative techniques to implement customer engagement and WFO best practices.