Ignore your Customer: The 8 types of Voice-of-Customer responses you can safely toss.

What do irrelevant VOC survey comments look like? (And how do you handle them?)

Source: Zazzle.com

When I first came to my language and cultural coaching job, I was appalled at the comments I was seeing from customers. They were so angry! Listening to my first few calls, especially those that had  angry comments attached, I could see why they were so mad. But over time, I learned that not every comment has merit, or is even true! 

Here's the easiest to spot types:

(Let's say your call center is handling KableForAll, a mega-provider of Cable Services )

1: Response clearly refers to another company's product or service. 

Looks like:
 "Every time I call you clowns, it takes three hours to get through. And then you still can't take my order right. All I want is to get easy, correct phone service. How hard is that in this day and age?!"

2: Response is mostly or fully based on the fact of outsourcing itself.

 Looks like: 
 "If President Whatever had a good head on his shoulders, he would BRING JOBS BACK TO AMERICA!"

3: Response is upset about out- of- scope issues:

Looks like: 
"Look, if I pay for a one year warranty, I think it's not too much to ask for you all to extend the courtesy by at least 2 months!"

4: Response is unintelligible or garbled. 

Looks like:
"yea, whatevs. You guys sux. Haterrrssss!"

Medium- Easy to spot

5: Response is based on the quality or standards of the product, and not your services:

Looks like:
 "This throttling is not what I paid for! GIVE ME MY FULL CABLE AND GAMES!"

6: Response is a reaction to a chain of events your rep just happened to be the last person to handle:

Looks like:
 "I am cancelling my service because since July of 2007 I have NEVER received good service. Good day to you!"

7: Response is specific, but upon reviewing the call, in your professional opinion, the rep did not commit the errors you read about:

Looks like:
"The rep kept me on hold for 45 minutes!! Is that what you yahoos call service!!! And when he got on the phone I could barely understand him, his accent was so thick!"

Hardest level: 

 8: Response is specific, but does not hit the issue. However, there were issues on the call, just not what the customer called out.

Looks like: 
"How many times am I going to call these phone lines and get an INDIAN on the phone? I am so tired of hearing the same scripted CRAP over and and over." (Your reps are not Indian, and do not use scripts, but they had accent and delivery issues). 

How do you handle these?

Well, every call center has its own protocols, but usually your Quality Assurance Team has come up with tags that will clearly indicate that the response is not relevant to your scores, and why. 

It's also key to have calibrations, both with your teams and with your clients. Ensure that what they consider an out of scope response is also what you consider out of scope. Equally important is the "why" they agree to toss out a survey response-- make sure that when you're discounting responses it's for the same reasons as your clients'.

Ensure that you are not biased, as much as you can. As a trainer and a coach, I had soft spots for certain reps, favorites, and people I did not give any inch of excuses for. We all do it. Just make sure you're not dismissing a comment because you "know Jim is a great guy" or giving more weight to a nutzy comment because that "Misty kind of *is* a b----".

Make sure you read the comments, the Quality Reports, and the breakdowns of the tags every time they come out. Again, different call centers have different tools, and they can sometimes vary from account to account, but most call centers track all kinds of stats. Ensure that you as a trainer or a coach work with your operations team to get access to those tools and reports and for goodness sake, use them!

Finally, it's important to do lots of audits. I used to audit almost 100 calls a week, and I became very good at spotting good calls that the customer would  wind up giving a bad review to. Calls where the customer couldn't get what they wanted, they were just plain mean people, or they had an axe to grind with the system or the product. 

Remember: when evaluating criticism, first consider the source.