When Missing a Call Really Matters – Dispatching Service

You need your calls to arrive around the clock but having a staff of dispatchers doesn’t fit in your budget. The issue is in-house dispatchers get paid whether calls are coming in or not. There is an affordable alternative for you! With dispatching services from Ansafone, you pay dispatchers when they answer your calls. Our dispatching service is available 24/7/365 and when calls arrive for you they are answered in a professional and courteous manner. All calls are answered and dispatched as per your instructions. Every dispatched call is recorded for your review and protection.

Our agents are professionally trained and will follow your service dispatching instructions exactly. Your callers will not know they are speaking with and Ansafone agent. Our agents and technology become a seamless extension of your business operations. We can accommodate a requirement for one dispatcher or for one-hundred dispatching service agents.

Depending on your needs, our agents can dispatch by phone, pager message, text message, or email message. It’s your decision and we will not vary our service delivery until you change the instructions you want us to follow. With a single call to your assigned Ansafone Account Executive, you can adjust dispatching instructions for your business.

Ansafone dispatches for companies nationwide. Our prices are competitive and we handle requirements for one dispatcher or several hundred. Ansafone offers the experience to roll-out your service correctly and if there are issues can quickly make adjustments to your services.

Ansafone’s dispatching services can be delivered 24/7/365 or only after your regular business hours if you prefer. Call us today to discuss your plan. We will share our approach and for supporting your company with reliable and professional dispatching services. Call (800) 510-0514 today for a no obligation consultation.

Ansafone Is An Award Winner – TMC’s Customer Magazine 2013 MVP Quality Award

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ May 3, 2013 /

TMC and CUSTOMER Magazine Announce the 2013 MVP Quality Award Winners

TMCnet News

Norwalk, CT (May 2, 2013) – TMC, a global, integrated media company, and CUSTOMER magazine, the leading publication in CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982, have announced the winners of the 2013 MVP Quality Award.

Winners were chosen by the editors of CUSTOMER and represent the leading innovators in the contact center industry. The awards recognize companies that have delivered a consistent, unparalleled commitment to quality, excellence and the highest ethical standards over the last 12 months.

Awards were given at the Gold, Silver and Bronze levels to an elite group of just eight companies.

“The 2013 MVP Quality Award winners have all impressed the editors of CUSTOMER with their ability to build a feeling of community within their company, while providing the best service they can give to their clients,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC (News – Alert).

The winners were announced in the March 2013 issue of CUSTOMER and are listed below:

Gold
Agero
InfoCision Management Corp.

Silver
Alorica
The Connection
Aegis Ltd.
NCO Group/APAC Customer Services

Bronze
Synergy Solutions
Ansafone Contact Centers

About CUSTOMER:
Since 1982, CUSTOMER magazine (formerly Customer Interaction Solutions) has been the voice of the call/contact center, CRM and teleservices industries. CUSTOMER has helped the industry germinate, grow, mature and prosper, and has served as the leading publication in helping these industries that have had such a positive impact on the world economy to continue to thrive. Through a combination of outstanding and cutting-edge original editorial, industry voices, in-depth lab reviews and the recognition of the innovative leaders in management and technology through our highly valued awards, CUSTOMER strives to continue to be the publication that holds the quality bar high for the industry. Please visit http://www.customer.tmcnet.com.

About TMC:
TMC is a global, integrated media company that supports clients’ goals by building communities in print, online, and face to face. TMC publishes multiple magazines including Cloud Computing, M2M Evolution, Customer, and Internet Telephony. TMCnet is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries, and is read by as many as 1.5 million unique visitors monthly. TMC produces a variety of trade events, including ITEXPO, the world’s leading B2B communications event, as well as industry events: 3D Printing Conference & Expo; Asterisk (News – Alert) World; AstriCon; (CVx) ChannelVision Expo; Cloud4SMB Expo; DevCon5 – HTML5 & Mobile App Developers Conference; M2M Evolution Conference & Expo; Mobile Commerce Zone Conference & Expo; SecureIT; StartupCamp; Super Wi-Fi Summit; SIP Trunking-Unified Communications (News – Alert) Seminars; Wearable Tech Conference & Expo; WebRTC Conference & Expo; and more. Visit TMC Events for additional information.

For more information on TMC, visit http://www.tmcnet.com.

TMC Contact:
Drew Stoga
Marketing Manager
203-852-6800, ext. 175
dstoga@tmcnet.com
Edited by Alisen Downey

Customer Service Outsourcing – A Call Center Inbound Service

Let Ansafone Help You With Outsourcing Your Customer Service Operations

Written and Posted by Leonard Scales

Having a customer service organization that serves the interests of your customer seems to be a basic business principle. After all, a well-run customer service organization can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and this alone can positively impact your bottom-line results. Your competitors will be placed at a distinct disadvantage when your customer service organization performs at a highly professional level.

Outsourcing aspects of your customer services organization to a call center is low risk. It’s a proven process. Some companies have outsourced their entire customer support organization to call centers and others outsource specific customer support areas. Regardless, Ansafone delivers outsourced customer service solutions that will give your company access to state of the art technologies and trained, professional agents who are second to none in the call center services industry. Our award winning outsourced teams are trained to be an extension of you.

Why Consider Outsourcing Your Customer Services to Ansafone?
•Consistent customer engagements based on your protocols
•Expert handling of your customer service details such as order processing, Tier 1 Support, pre-sales support, product returns, direct response support, etc.
•The potential for increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement – driven by experts
•Data collected on each customer encounter – excellent source for mining
•The potential for first call resolution of customer service issues
•A low risk investment in a proven service process
•More freedom for you to focus on your core business issues
•Cost savings in terms of your time and limited internal resources

Call Ansafone today at (866) 309-3606 to learn how we can professionally manage this aspect of your business.

Outsourcing Portions Of Your Customer Service Operations

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ April 22, 2013 /

Let Ansafone Help You With Outsourcing Your Customer Service Operations

Having a customer service organization that serves the interests of your customer seems to be a basic business principle. After all, a well-run customer service organization can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and this alone can positively impact your bottom-line results. Your competitors will be placed at a distinct disadvantage when your customer service organization performs at a highly professional level.

Outsourcing aspects of your customer services organization to a call center is low risk. It’s a proven process. Some companies have outsourced their entire customer support organization to call centers and others outsource specific customer support areas. Regardless, Ansafone delivers outsourced customer service solutions that will give your company access to state of the art technologies and trained professional agents who are second to none in the call center services industry. Our award winning outsourced teams are trained to be an extension of you.

Why Consider Outsourcing Your Customer Services to Ansafone?
•Consistent customer engagements based on your protocols
•Expert handling of your customer service details such as order processing, Tier 1 Support, pre-sales support, product returns, direct response support, etc.
•The potential for increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement – driven by experts
•Data collected on each customer encounter – excellent source for mining
•The potential for first call resolution of customer service issues
•A low risk investment in a proven service process
•Frees you to focus on your core business issues
•Saves time and your limited internal resources

Call Ansafone today at (866) 309-3606 to learn how we can professionally manage this aspect of your business.

Outsourcing Email Management – An Outsourced Call Center Service From Ansafone

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ February 5, 2013 /

Have you had the experience of contacting a company by email, asking a question about a product, or service, or technical issue and never receiving any kind of a response? Not even an automated reply indicating your email has been received and actions are being taken on your behalf? It’s frustrating when this happens but it isn’t a rare occurrence. Even large companies with dedicated email response groups sometimes miss the mark of achieving timely and accurate customer replies.

When inquiries are made about a product or service, shoppers expect a rapid and accurate response. Customers have high expectation and can quickly become impatient when responses to their email inquiries are not returned in a “reasonable” timeframe or at all.

As the clock ticks and responses are not received to their inquiries, customers will often look for other ways to get the attention of the company they’re trying to reach. Multiple duplicate emails are sent, phone calls begin, faxes start, and social media posts follow. Multiple inquiries cost companies money, and in the long-term, possibly a tarnished reputation. Add to this the possibility of poor customer service responses going viral on social media and the impact becomes clearer.

A recent Amazon.com seller example illustrates one of the consequences of a slow email response. The seller’s lack of an email response continues to affect their reputation and probably its bottom-line sales results today. Here’s what happened. A consumer purchased some very expensive hunting knives from an Amazon seller. The seller had a high buyer rating. The customer received the knife order and made a gift of them to a friend in another state. The person receiving the gift, a knife collector, realized the Amazon seller had sent knives that were not the quality his friend had ordered. This was probably a legitimate error by the seller. The original buyer contacted the Amazon seller about the error but never received a reply. A second inquiry was sent but the seller didn’t reply.

To make a long story short, after the buyer didn’t receive a reply from the seller, he went on a campaign of writing a series of negative reviews about his experience with the seller. Public online reviews so scathing that the seller’s bottom-line was no doubt affected. Ultimately the buyer was given a refund of the difference in the cost between the knife sets. Guess what? At the writing of this summary, the negative reviews were still on Amazon and two other recommendation and review sites. How many consumers have been deterred from making a purchase from that seller because of poor email response?

What Works For Email Management

There is an approach companies can implement to help assure their email responses are accurate, consistent, and satisfying for their consumers. Recommendation, outsource your email rmanagement to a specialist that delivers this service as a reliable customer support channel for clients. Effective email management will provide your customers with immediate replies to their inquiries and let them know their messages have been received and actions will be taken within some timeframe – 24 hours or 48 hours for instance. Actually, depending on the nature of the inquiry, some resolutions can be immediately sent leading to instant resolution.

Also depending on the content of the message, your email management partner can determine if the inquiry is one where FAQ responses would satisfy the issues or if a genuine problem escalation process should be initiated and subject matter experts involved.

Your email management partner’s job is to keep customer satisfaction responses at high measurable levels. One measure could be the number of inquiries resolved by your email response partner on their first email response to customers. Their focus will be on delivering rapid, accurate, and consistent responses to inquiries in the shortest timeframe possible.

What can you expect from outsourced email management? Here are a few examples:
•Consistent and accurate responses to product and services inquiries
•Pre-sale question answered
•Rapid fulfillment of email orders – email support for order processing
•Post-sale support and implementation questions answered
•Customer Affairs issues responded to – product recalls, safety warnings
•Answers about new product introductions and new product features
•Response to payment questions and methods – billing questions resolved
•Email response driven customer services – member services, subscription renewal, “how are we doing” surveys, welcome packages for new customers, events notifications (online and offline), and much more
•Pre-technical sales support interviews to properly route technical support requests
•Technical support
•Trained and email response certified agents trained in best practices for email response
•Agents with writing and communication skills required to deliver a high level of customer satisfaction
•Replenishment reminders – orders taken
•Metrics collected on daily agent performance and service levels
•Agents thoroughly schooled in your brand communication standards and expectations
•All inquiries and replies captured and analyzed for potential process improvements.

Having a solid strategy for email response is a business critical. Outsourcing this important customer services channel to an experiences partner can improve your bottom-line sales results and improve your reputation. Remember, positive customer remarks about your responsiveness and accuracy in solving issues can lead to glowing reviews and more customers!

Direct Response – An On-Demand Call Center Service From Ansafone

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ February 5, 2013 /

It’s an important promotional period for your brand. Media has been purchased for online, print ads, and television runs. The television media buys features airing times spanning all time zones in the USA and Canada. Some of the advertising time slots are during hours when the media buys cost less and are between 1:00am and 4:00am. You marketing shows a substantial number of consumers make purchases during those odd hours and during early afternoon timeslots.

Making the correct media buys is an important element in determining the success of marketing campaigns. Afterall, brands are making appeals to consumers to purchase their product. If the most promising consumers never see the ads, it’s an opportunity lost.

For some brands there is an additional need for call center services. This is where Ansafone Contact Centers can provide services 24/7/365. Ansafone’s On-Demand call center services are implemented to coodinate with advertising schedules. It’s during these advertising periods that calls reach a peak and the drop off until the next series of TV ads. Ansafone offers call center flexibility for our clients. When calls spike during the day our night, our team is there to answer On-Demand requirements.

Ansafone provides a cost-effective On-Demand approach for our clients that need Direct Response call center support. We use cross trained agent teams that can shift focus when needed to cover demand spikes. Ansafone uses our technology to route calls as necessary to agents trained to support your campaign. We assure that busy signals or dropped calls do not deter callers.

The Benefits Of Ansafone Call Center Direct Response Services
•Reliable media driven call center services – 24/7/365
•Cross trained sales agents provide a cost-effective support team
•The real potential for increased sales conversions
•Agent teams versed un up-selling and cross-selling techniques
•Scheduling flexibility
•A scalable On-demand approach
•Scripts created in consultation with you our client
•Complete data collection and daily service level reporting

Ansafone is truly and extension of you! Contact us and see how we can support your marketing calendar with industry leading call center services, (866) 309-3606. Visit us at http://www.ansafone.com

Industry Brand Specialist – Call Center High-Touch Customer Support

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ February 5, 2013 /

Since 1970 Ansafone has served thousands of clients spanning almost every industry with comprehensive call center services. Clients from the Public and Private sectors take advantage of our inbound and outsourced call center customer services. As a result of more than forty years of industry experience, Ansafone has developed expert teams organized to quickly respond to client requirements. Ansafone customer service and sales support teams can deliver the entire range of services required by a client, or supplement a client’s internal resources. Ansafone delivers answering services, call center services, email management, live chat, and social media monitoring and engagement services in a mix that best supports our clients.

Ansafone’s clients have come to expect and appreciate how rapidly we respond to their needs and how expertly we deliver upon their requirements. Ansafone provides our clients with a proven framework for customer service and sales support delivery. Consulting with our clients, Ansafone creates client specific call center support plans. Our services are delivered for both inbound and outbound communications.

Working with our industry and brand specialists we consult with our clients to create just the right mix of customer touch-points. At times this mix includes call center and email management and at other times includes call center and live chat. Perhaps a combination of call center, live chat and social media engagement is the best approach for a different client. No matter the touch-points, our clients have come to appreciate our call center expertise, rapid deployment strategies, and comprehensive reporting, and analytics.

High-touch requires a high level of industry and brand expertise and supporting integrated hardware and software technologies. Our management teams train and coach certified agents to deliver high-touch customer service and sales support for our clients based on their specific industry or brand category. These are specialist teams created to deliver call center, customer support, and sales support that align tightly with client strategies and branding. Our specialist teams have access to integrated customer relationship management systems, data capture, and reporting to support all client interactions and data analytics.

Voice Of The Customer Drives Insights – Social Media Customer Services

In addition to having industry and brand category expertise, Ansafone uses a combination of enterprise level and software-as-a-service applications (SAAS) that augment “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) capture for our clients. Ansafone captures every customer interaction whether the contact is made by voice, email, text, fax, or social web engagement. Hundreds of thousands of transactions, in a variety of formats, are completed and captured daily by our agents! This is truly “Big Data”.

Ansafone technologies allow expert teams to better understand consumer sentiments, brand preferences, willingness to refer family and friends to your brand, and to better support our client programs. Coupling our expert teams, certified trained agents, and Voice of the Customer technologies helps to assure all client customer support and sales issues are viewed and approached in a consistent and clearly defined manner. Ansafone’s agents have a wide array of tools available at their fingertips that enhance the customer experience. They are efficient and well trained and become and extension a seamless expression of you.

As part of our feedback loop with clients, we provide insights into all call center customer responses and a dive into VOC data analytics that assists them in preparing new customer service options, design new products or services, and devise ways to genuinely engage with their customers to improve bottom-line results.

Contact Ansafone at (866) 309-3606 for a no cost or obligation discussion regarding your customer service and sales support requirements. We’re confident our approach will support you with the call center, email, live chat, answering services, text services, or social media monitoring and engagement ideas you’re thinking about. Visit us at http://www.ansafone.com.

Social Media and the Call Center – A New Role

Social Media and the Call Center – A New Role

Posted by Leonard Scales
/ January 10, 2013 /

Not long ago marketers and their agencies were exclusively in a push mode when it came to their advertising and marketing campaigns. Their programs were designed to push out information and offers to consumers. Often there were one size fits all themes to their campaigns. A single advertisement ran in all markets as diverse as New York, Detroit, Dallas, Orlando, and Los Angeles with goal of enticing all consumers in those markets to buy.

My how the world is changing! Marketers are now getting onboard with the notion of active engagement with their consumers. Brands are creating two-way communications between themselves and customers, and in some cases, facilitating three-way communications allowing customers to communicate with each other.

Consumers are demanding relevant and genuine dialogs with companies. The marketing approach where offers and ads are pushed to consumers will probably never go away, however more marketing dollars are being spent each year on creating two-way engagements with consumers.

So what’s does this have to do with a call center. We say everything! Call centers are evolving to become the communications hub for brands. Not only do they deliver and manage inbound and outbound calls, they also deliver email services, live chat, website responses, and now social media monitoring and engagement. A modern call center should have the technology infrastructure, reporting capabilities, analytics, and people power in place to support social media engagement on behalf of their clients. It’s a natural extension of their customer support suite of services.

It’s probably impossible for a VP of Marketing, their Advertising and PR agencies to monitor the social conversations occurring about their brand over the social web. There are potentially thousands of Facebook comments, Tweets, Product Reviews, Product and Service Ratings, Youtube videos, and Blog postings flying around that go unnoticed. Some of these comments are positive and some are not. Just Google social “media problems” “airlines “pizza” or “hotels” and scroll down. You can pick almost any industry!

Social Media is more than another customer support or communications channel. It a way for brands to actively engage with their customers around themes relevant to their customers. This is where call centers can play a pivotal role in a Social Media Customer Support strategy.

A call center can deploy the tools to monitor a brand’s most important social web interactions, integrate these conversations with CRM systems, and provide insights to Marketing and PR teams. This monitoring can help you and your call center to join the conversation in ways relevant to your consumers. Not with the goal of controlling the conversation but rather with the goal of providing genuine relevancy.

If you’re delivering online Social Media Promotions, Contests, and Sweepstakes, it’s a 99.9999% certainty your entries will need moderating before being accepted to assure the content and comments are appropriate for your program. Your call center partner could certainly provide the moderation services based on your guidelines and do so on a 24/7/365 basis until your program ends, and longer if you leave the site up for awhile – a strong recommendation.

We’ve had the experience where a rock band running a fan contest allowed every comment and every photo added to their online contest – Zero Moderation! Most brands should never attempt this!

Monitoring

Utilizing both human skills and technology tools your call center partner could scourer social sites relevant to your brand and “listen” to the conversations. Based on algorithms created by you and your call center, comments could be analyzed for their points of view, perceived emotion, and relevance to the brand. Comments containing key phrases or words can be flagged for response. And because call centers are generally multilingual, these conversations can be monitored nationally and internationally.

Moderation – Not Total Exclusion

The volume of social media communication is huge. With more than 200 million Tweets per day, 3.2 billion Facebook Likes and Comments, and 3 billion Youtube views per day, most brands could use a communications partner to add order to this free-for-all! A call center can position its resources to monitor and moderate social web communities important to your brand. These communities could be brand specific communities created by a brand for specific consumer groups, relevant blogs, online contest, promotions, sweepstakes, live chat, website engagements, online events, and more! Moderation to assure inappropriate content isn’t displayed but not eliminating all negative comments.

Relevant Genuine Engagement

With guidance, your call center partner can be position to understand how and when to engage with your consumers. Your call center partner can help you to create a procedural guide that assists them and your internal teams to know who, how, when, and where to respond and engage. If the guidelines are agreeable to your brand and to your call center partner, your call center can deliver the consumer engagement for you and track and report on the results. It’s a natural extension of the services they already deliver. Your call center should be a seamless expression of you!

Social Web Analytics

The social web offers a wide array of interactions to measure and track. Your call center partner should tailor your programs to track the information important to your brand. Of course things change so there should be flexibility on how they support you from a business insights and consumer response perspective. If your key performance indicators change, the services offered by your call center should change to reflect these changes.
The social web has opened new opportunities to engage with consumers in very relevant business building ways. Your call center partner can be you key to tapping into opportunities presented by the social web.

It’s An Extensive Process Getting Hired As An Ansafone Agent

WRITTEN AND POSTED BY LEONARD SCALES / JANUARY 10, 2013 /

It’s not just about answering phones at Ansafone. Our agents face a stringent employment process before they can support our clients. The reason for this is straightforward. Our clients expect the best from us and we pledge to deliver the best possible customer support services. Our agents must become a seamless extension of you!

The process begins with a hand written application form. If the writing passes Ansafone standards, the potential agent is invited to participate in a telephone interview where their conversational tone and communication skill sets are evaluated. We assure phone demeanor matches our clients’ call center requirements. For instance or Healthcare and Hospice clients look for agents that display a high level of empathy and a caring tone. If the potential agent passes these evaluations, they are invited for an interview at an Ansafone office. During the interview process they are tested on a variety of parameters that include:

Personality traits assessment – a written test
Computer skills – Internet navigation
Vocal projection
Typing speed
Spelling
Grammar
Selling skills
Customer service skills
Professionalism, friendliness, team building, interpersonal skills
Our call center agent training facility is state-of-the-art and each agent candidate is exposed to the actual systems and processes the will encounter when supporting our clients. All of our training facilities are fully integrated with one another across all of our sites. Each training facility has video/audio conferencing that allow our trainers and agents to interact with other sites and share best practices. We ensure all agents, regardless of location, have the ability to connect with any other training facility and instructors. Before agents are placed in the position to support our clients, there are more tests and evaluations!

Ansafone creates customer support scenarios that mirror actual situations agents could face while supporting our clients. We measure their ability to manage stress, conflict, ability to follow instructions when stressed, what reactions they reveal during very busy periods, and how they communicate with their team members and managers.

Not every agent interaction is by phone. Several of our agents deliver live chat, email response, deliver text messages, and monitor social media for clients. For these service deliveries our agents need to demonstrate solid verbal skills and the ability to learn and navigate desktop technologies and tools. These agents are tested, trained, and shadowed by a manager until they are proficient to support clients.

At this point the agent is still not hired by Ansafone. We conduct background checks and contact references listed on their application.

Many of Ansafone’s agents have been onboard for several years. They’ve become seamless extensions of our client brands. Ansafone realizes the value of maintaining professional, well trained, and highly motivated agents. Our agents and their managers participate in team building activities and incentive programs designed to motivate and keep their sharp focus.

Ansafone is proud of its reputation for retaining a team of top performing agents. Our managers are developed from within and advancement opportunities are continuously available as new clients are on-boarded. We welcome you to come and learn more about our team, culture, and call center services.

Looking for a professional team to support your communication needs that include call center, live chat, email management, answering services, and social media management? Please give us a call at (800) 510-0514. We’d like to learn about your organization and share our approach. Visit Ansafone at http://www.ansafone.com.

Net Promoter Score Defined – NPS “On a scales of zero to 10, how likely are you to refer a friend or colleague?”

WRITTEN AND POSTED BY LEONARD SCALES / JANUARY 7, 2013 /

No doubt you’ve seen a question similar to the one above after purchasing a product or service online. You were asked a series of questions covering a variety of customer satisfaction issues and you were presented a scale that ranged from 0 to10 to help guage your customer satisfaction levels.

These questions are based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – an actual scientific methodology designed to gather and measure customer sentiment. NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, where he examines how to predict whether a customer will continue being a loyal purchaser of your product and become a referrer of your product to a friend. Something every brand wants to achieve!

The Net Promoter Score methodology is based on a single question that expands into a series of similar questions about the customer’s experience with a product or service. The question that predicts the future purchasing and referral behaviors of customer is: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to refer to a friend of colleague?”

The answers customers provide are grouped into the following categories:

0 – 6 = “Detractors” – will never purchase your product again and are very likely to spread negative word-of-mouth information
7 – 8 = “Passives” – not motivated to purchase your product or service and can be easily swayed to purchase from a competitor
9 – 10 = “Promoters” – loyal buyers who are very likely to deliver very positive word-of-mouth spread
After the customer responses are collected, the NPS is formulated by subtracting the percentage of those responding as “Detractors” from the percentage of those responding as “Promoters”.

Here is the formula: % of Promoters – % of Detractors = NPS. The score can range from -100 to 100.

Here is an example of how to calculate NPS. Let’s say you’ve received responses from 500 consumers regarding their level of satisfaction and likelihood of promoting your new line of “Delicatessen Natural Fruit Snacks”:

50 responses were in the 0 – 6 range (Detractors)
100 responses were in the 7 – 8 range (Passives)
350 responses were in the 9 – 10 range (Promoters

The percentage for each group is 10%, 20%, and 70% respectively.

Calculating the NPS in this example is straightforward. Subtract the Detractors 10% from the Promoters 70%. NPS is always expressed as an integer and never as a percentage. In this case the NPS equals 60.

A rating on a scale of 0 to 10 is intuitive and number 10 is considered excellent and a 0 is very poor. Many NPS scorers convert the score of 60 in the above scoring example to the number 6, relating it to the 0 to 10 scale. Most NPS experts urge their clients to stretch to achieve a 7 or 9 score. It’s considered very risky to be below 1 out of 10 for instance.

It’s straightforward getting started with measuring NPS. There are many NPS questionnaire development and survey tools available on the market that will allow you to develop and deliver online customer satisfaction queries. The tools provide sample questions as a guide, and after your customers respond, calculate the results. You can quickly have quantified customer responses. You’ll know who Detractors are, Passives customers, and your Promoters.

Modern call centers can consult with you to create NPS programs and comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys. NPS and surveys can be easily outsourced to a call center that will calculate the results and present the reports.

Even though NPS is based on scientific methodologies some criticize it as being too narrow to be the only measure for defining customer satisfaction. Most business academicians recommend more comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys coupled with NPS as being the best method for providing decision support regarding customer satisfaction issues.

What you’ve probably noticed is the NPS measure is a score. NPS makes no judgments about what decisions need to be made about how to improve customer services or other areas of the company as it relates to customers. Broader more comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys coupled with NPS might actually lead to process improvements that positively impact customer satisfaction and bottom-line results.

If your goal is learning whether or not your customers will Detract from or positively Promote your brand, NPS is an excellent start. Coupled with more comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys, NPS can provide solid insights regarding customer satisfaction process improvement. A technically savvy call center can deliver this service for you on an outsourced basis.

For more information about NPS, Comprehensive Surveys, and how a Call Center can support you, please call 800-510-0514. Visit us at http://www.ansafone.com.