Quality Times, Vocalabs' Newsletter

In This Issue

• Credit Card Complaint Data from the CFPB
• ROI of Customer Feedback

Credit Card Complaint Data from the CFPB

Recently the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) started publishing a data set of consumer complaints about credit cards. As this data complements Vocalabs' National Customer Service Survey data on customer service at major banks, we are republishing the CFPB data as a set of dashboards and reports comparing different companies' credit card complaints in several key metrics. These reports and dashboards will be updated as new CFPB data becomes available.

We have created three graphical dashboards comparing companies' performance on key metrics. The dashboards show graphs for the eight companies with the most complaints in the database (as of September 2012), and we also have interactive tables with complete data for all companies.

• Timely Responses: Shows how often customers received a timely response to their complaints about different companies. View Dashboard | View Table

• Customer Disputed Resolution: Compares the percentage of complaints where customers disputed the resolution offered by their bank. View Dashboard | View Table
• Monetary Resolution: Shows how often customer complaints resulted in the bank paying the customer money in order to resolve the complaint. View Dashboard | View Table

We are also providing other data and metrics in an interactive table format, allowing anyone interested to build their own views of the report and export the data as a spreadsheet. We have pre-built a few tables you can use as starting points:

• Complaint Metrics by Company: All three of the metrics in the dashboards above, included in a single table for convenience.
• Complaint Metrics by Complaint Type: The three metrics in the dashboards, calculated by type of complaint.
• Types of Complaint by Company: The major types of complaints, calculated by company.

We hope you find this a useful tool for better understanding this data set. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements.

ROI of Customer Feedback

The return on investment of a good customer feedback program is more complicated to quantify than, for example, a new speech recognition system or more efficient contact center scheduling.

The ROI comes from a lot of sources. Some of these are hard dollars, and others are squishier:

1. The easiest return to quantify comes from finding and fixing broken processes and systems. It's common to find policies which can be streamlined, self-service processes which make no sense to the customer, and even systems which are outright broken. These cost hard dollars, and customers are usually very happy to tell you about them.
2. It's also easy to quantify the value of better decision-making. A good customer feedback program will give hard data about the customer impact of spending money on different parts of the service experience. For example, how much will customer satisfaction and loyalty improve by streamlining an IVR, and is it worth the money? Without the data, you have to take the vendor's word.
3. Better service leads to a strong improvement in customer loyalty. Our NCSS data consistently shows a 40-45 percentage point gain in customer loyalty among customers who report excellent customer service as compared to those whose service was mediocre or poor. Measuring the quality of the customer service experience is a critical piece in delivering outstanding service.
4. A strong customer feedback program is also a powerful training tool. People respond powerfully to hearing immediate feedback from real customers, and that means measurable improvements in service levels and less time spent in coaching or remediation.
5. The hardest return to quantify, but perhaps the largest, comes in brand image. Many companies (I won't name any but you can probably think of a few names) have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and brand equity destroyed when the company gets a bad reputation online because of poor service, missteps, and neglecting the basics of taking care of customers.