How Root Cause Analysis Can Solve CX Issues

How Root Cause Analysis Can Solve CX Issues

Most businesses approach customer experience problems from the angle of agent performance. They believe that if the customer isn’t satisfied, the agent must be guilty.

This strategy occasionally even appears to work—at least temporarily. But soon after, they need to place out a replacement fire that has started. Without pausing to seem for truth underlying cause, managers spend all of their time putting out new fires.

In reality, most agents are proficient at what they are doing. The important problems are frequently organizational structural problems that hinder your team’s efforts to produce excellent customer service, dissatisfying both agents and clients.

Root Cause Analysis is required

Root cause analysis: what’s it?

The term “root cause analysis” means exactly what it says. You identify the underlying causes of issues so you’ll address them instead of just their symptoms.

Sakichi Toyoda, the person behind Toyota, is credited with developing root cause analysis. He made the “five whys” method of root cause analysis popular. To spot the foundation of the problem, follow this straightforward process of asking “5 whys”  times.

For instance, Toyota enquired on why mechanics were drilling holes of the inaccurate size. The explanation was that they were using inaccurate drill bits. But why were those drill bits the incorrect ones, Because of incorrect blueprints? Until they found the basis of the problem, they continued. Because a replacement manufacturing engineer was unaware that he needed to submit new designs to quality assurance, the blueprints were incorrect.

How can the customer industry use root cause analysis?

Consider that your clients have become impatient because your agents don’t appear to be able to assist them with a selected issue, like changing their delivery address, changing their account password, or receiving an email or SMS confirmation. You’ve received some criticism. So you separate those agents and instruct them on the way to resolve those problems. Better, yes?

However, complaints about other agents are still being received. As you look further, you discover that your agents aren’t difficult. It’s possible that training and onboarding don’t cover this particular subject. ensuring it’s added for brand new team members and holding a further team-wide training session for your current agents solves the difficulty. Alternately, you would possibly realize that your problem is the result of a design flow. For instance, consider asking a customer to produce a security code that they will only find in your app, but they’re unable to access the app itself. You’ve applied a root cause analysis technique, a bit like within the Toyota example, to seem past employee performance to the underlying structure.

Root Cause Analysis’s Advantages

If you retain putting out fires, eventually you’ll run out of things to place out. This circle is broken by root cause analysis and:

• Enables you to spot true explanations for issues so you’ll stop future fires from occurring;
• Improves your knowledge of what works and doesn’t for your business;
• Leads you to more practical solutions that you just can use team-wide or throughout the whole organization;
• Reduces the value related to answering those questions by releasing you from the cycle of solving variations of the identical problem repeatedly;
• Identifies common reasons for customer complaints so you’ll be able to avoid them in the future

How Does one Spot Potential Problems?

Now that you simply are awake to what root cause analysis is, how does one determine after you require it? I counsel exploring these three informational resources:

• Analyze your statistics and ticket distribution. Is there a specific location where there are many anomalies? Maybe certain ticket types have a high rate of reopening. Or perhaps you observe a team’s average ticket handling time is twice as long as it should be, or CSATs are lower in a very particular market area. Keep a watch out for any signs that your performance is inconsistent.
• Ask your team for feedback. Since they’re on the front lines, they’re the primary to note issues. They will allow you to know if there are any odd patterns. You’ll be able to use the fresh, current customer feedback provided by your agents. Inquiring for feedback from your team also motivates them to pay closer attention to customers’ daily needs, which is nice for customer satisfaction.
• Analyze the CSAT data you received. Analyze customer comments in-depth. You must closely examine the causes of your customers’ dissatisfaction whether you’re using AI or manual review.

Keep in mind that among the weekly support tickets you receive is a veritable gold mine of data. Your clients are already detailing in great detail the problems they’re having with their customer experience! You now have an amazing place to begin your issue-finding process.

Now That you’ve Got Identified the Issues, How Does one Gain a Deeper Understanding?

Here are four steps you’ll be able to go to locate the problems causing poor customer experiences:

Create a QA scorecard first

Create a QA scorecard to start by rating various aspects of every customer interaction. Currently, quality assurance could be a challenge for up to 87 percent of companies. You’ll be able to prevent becoming one amongst them by employing a QA scorecard. You’ll be able to use the data on a QA scorecard to form decisions that are clearly supported by data. So as to keep up the consistency, creating a scorecard can assist you in identifying the underlying reason behind poor data quality.

With the help of QA scorecards, you’ll compile statistical proof of the precise reason behind why your customer experience process isn’t performing needless to say.

Managers (or agents) can use your QA scorecard as a checklist to review customer service responses. to make a successful QA scorecard, you need:

• A distinct idea of what you hope to get on. Choose what matters most because you cannot score every aspect of each interaction. Time to respond? Agent awareness? Employing a corporate tone?
• A firm determination of the factors that ought to be prioritized. Certain factors are going to be given more weight than others.
• Scoring standards. Samples of common varieties of feedback include yes/no questions (was the agent-friendly? ), scoring scales (on a scale of 1 to five, how thoroughly did they answer the customer’s question? ), and rating systems. Also as written rankings like “good,” “poor,” or “average.”

Apply the scorecard to an acceptable selection of tickets

You’ll want to use your scorecard now that you simply have one! Start by staring at a sample of the tickets that are relevant to the matter you would like to research. Pick tickets that match if you would like to find out why a specific sort of ticket features a high reopen rate. Select tickets for that team if you wish to scale back response times for that team. One of our customers within the food industry conducted an analysis of their refund procedure with a team of 200 customer service representatives (a critical process within the food delivery industry.) to stay track of varied metrics, they used a QA scorecard. Were the requests for refunds valid? Which circumstances did they provide refunds in? Which delivery personnel received the foremost requests for refunds?

Their customer service director was able to make data-driven choices due to those insights. To confirm that the refund procedure is proceeding without hiccups and that the refund costs stay within acceptable bounds, they now conduct QA scoring on an everyday basis.

Maintain consistency together with your scorecard by keeping it simple and simple to use. Make quality assurance (QA) a daily activity for your team, and you will be able to spot issues before they become major ones.

Conduct group workshops

58 percent of managers are now engaging agents in additional frequent conversations, showing that they’re becoming more attentive to the actual fact that their customer service team is the expert on the procedures. Understand any flow issues or problems your customer service team has run into by taking note of their collective wisdom. Utilize their expertise to identify obstacles that will be the source of issues.

Run your new procedure through a test

So, you’ve identified a process issue. The new, improved process must now be used, and also the outcomes must be watched.

Assign the new process to a particular project team. Continue tracking results along with your QA scorecard. Improved outcomes? Great! Not getting the outcomes you expected? Re-monitor the method after evaluation and modification.

Guidelines for Successful Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis isn’t perfect, rather like the other methodology. I offer the subsequent advice to form the foremost of your root cause analysis:

• Recognize that some customer service issues have multiple underlying causes. Before you experience the change you desire, you may have to address a variety of issues or conduct multiple root cause analyses.
• Always return to the facts. To support your analysis, search for specific cause and effect information.
• Keep your attention on the how and why of a situation instead of the culprit. It is not about assigning blame; it’s about the underlying structure.
• Consider making fundamental process changes to prevent the recurrence of the identical root cause.

Additionally, I counsel remembering the stages of root cause analysis:

• Describe the problem
• Assemble pertinent data
• Determine the likely causes of the issue’s root problems.
• Utilize the information to develop and do an answer.

You can only go to this point with agent performance improvement. Finding the source of the issues is the best course of action when solving customer service problems. By addressing problems at their source, you’ll be one step sooner than the curve only if 69 percent of companies believe their customers are satisfied with the way complaints are handled but that only 26 percent of consumers are literally satisfied. Your customers are happier, and you may benefit in terms of agent experience and productivity.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.