Over the last few months, Prima conducted its first customer service satisfaction based survey.
In my new role as Customer Services Director I wanted to establish initially, what our customers actually think of the job we are doing and most importantly where our service can improve.
The questions were designed for us to receive genuine customer feedback, without which we would not have a clear, customer driven improvement strategy. There were both positive and negative responses.
Here are some of the standout figures from the survey responses.
- 51% of our customers prefer to contact by telephone, 41% by email, 8% via our LiveChat facility
- 38% of our customers do not subscribe to the Newsletter
- YouTube is by far our most followed social media support channel with 56%, however 23% don’t follow us on any
- 35% of customers believe it takes too long to respond to queries.
- 8 out of 10 customers would recommend Prima to users based on their customer service experiences.
Our learnings – Speed and Communication
The results were surprising, and for me very encouraging by the virtue that the team are overall providing a great service to our customers, whilst at the same time highlighting key areas for our improvement strategy.
1. The highest priority of which being our response times to complete customer queries. 35% of responders said that they feel we take too long to complete queries. To put this in to perspective, in 2018 our Customer Care team have averaged 84.5% of all customer queries being completed within 24 hours. We feel this represents a good level of service, however we want to offer the best service possible, and there is room for improvement both in the same day and 24 hour call completion.
If we’re not able to complete calls (perhaps due to a technical issue, or where a 3rd party is involved) according to our targets then it’s vital that we keep our customers informed of the progress. We will be providing customers with status updates where the calls are still open, for example queries which have been moved to our 2nd Line Customer Care team.
2. Another area that requires attention is communicating to our user base. The team at Prima are producing great daily, weekly and monthly content via our various help platforms, and it’s clear that the whole user base is not accessing, engaging or worse still for us, even aware of it. Through our Customer Care Team on phone or email, and through our UK & Ireland Account Management service we are putting in place measures to communicate our content more effectively.
PrimaHelp
Facebook Community
YouTube Channel
3. From the responses telephone and email support is really valuable to our user base and therefore to our service, but are users aware of our LiveChat facility? It’s actually the one of the fastest ways to get a response from the team. Again this is a communication point for us.
We move forward with help from our users
The team has been restructured with Kelly McCormick being promoted to the role of Customer Care Team Leader. Kelly’s key responsibilities over the first 12 months are to address these key areas of improvement for the department, raised by the survey.
We’re actively recruiting for team members to join our Prima Apprenticeship Program, along with developing the training platform for both our staff but also the Primahelp platform to help users access content on demand.
Our improvement strategy is already under way and to give an indicator of our progress, so far in September the 24 hour completion rates are at 91%.
The 2018 survey is first feedback of what will be an continuous improvement plan for us to really understand what we need to change to provide the Wow service that our customers deserve.
We are extremely grateful to those customers who took part and please continue to provide feedback for improvements to the service.
