Targeting: driving behaviours that impact your customer experience

We had been called into a company to evaluate their customer experience. We call this process ‘the Mirror’. In this case it included calling into their call centre and posing as customers. We were listening back to the calls to conduct our evaluation. While you could not fault the agents in terms of the salutation used, you definitely could sense tension in their voices, and they appeared to be talking at an unnatural speed. As the call proceeded and the agent felt he or she had answered the customer’s question, it was common to hear the agent say ‘OK then?’ or ‘Is that all?’ The message that came across was, ‘Can I go now? I really have other things to do.’ This was despite the fact that on a number of occasions the customer clearly had another question.