6 TOPDESK MAGAZINE - JUNE 2017

Bert Huijsen, director cloud services and customer care

and Rick Wijers, business process improvement consultant

Extreme insight into

customer satisfaction
How Ctac is learning from every customer interaction

Ctacs service desk handles dozens of calls from customers every day. These interactions
greatly influence customer satisfaction for this IT service provider specialized in cloud
integration. How does Ctac measure the key performance indicator of customer
satisfaction? And what knowledge do they gain from customer satisfaction statistics?
Text: Niek Steenhuis Photography: Aad Hogendoorn

Ctac implements and manages its own
hi-tech cash register solution for omnichannel
retailing, XV Retail Suite, and Microsoft and
SAP systems on any cloud. The company serves
hundreds of customers from different size
companies and in different lines of business:
from retail and wholesale to manufacturing
and real estate. Bert Huijsen has been director
of cloud services and customer care at Ctac
since 2014. His primary task? Making sure all
customers are happy with the services Ctac
offers them.
Getting closer to the customer
Managed service providers cant survive
if their customers arent happy. We focus
everything we do on making life better for the
customer, says Huijsen. He has a clear vision.
We want to be as close to the customer as
we can be. So, what we say to our customer is:
where do you want to be in five years, well use
our expertise to help you get there. Enabling
your Ambition is our guiding principle.
If you really want to collaborate with the
customer, you need extreme insight into
customer satisfaction. Huijsen: We already
took care of this for projects and consultancy
services. At least once a year, each consultant
asks his or her customers what they think
of him or her. And weve added a Customer
Improvement Program (CIP) to our contracts.
Once or twice a year we have a session with
the customer where we look at their strategy
and how Ctac can support that strategy.
While Ctac takes care of management for
its customers, there was no proper insight into
customer satisfaction. Huijsen: We process
a lot of calls every day and of course we strive
to solve them within the existing SLAs. But
that doesnt give us any information about
customer satisfaction. Its perfectly possible to
TOPDESK MAGAZINE - JUNE 2017 7
comply with all service level agreements while
both you and your customer arent satisfied.
Automatic registration
In 2015 Ctac takes the first step towards
making their processes more measurable,
helping them map customer satisfaction for
calls. Rick Wijers is closely involved in the
change as process improvement consultant.
We started looking for an efficient and
simple way to record customer satisfaction for
each call. TOPdesk provided the software they
needed. The organization was already using
TOPdesk to structure calls and malfunctions.
Our TOPdesk consultant told us that TOPdesk
provides an easy way for customers to rate the
way their calls are dealt with. When we heard
this, the decision was easy.
Feedback as part of the process
Wijers: We want to make it easy for the
customer to give feedback. So, we made
feedback part of the process for closing
calls. When one of our operators puts a
call on finished for process, the customer
automatically receives an email. The email
contains a link to a form where the customer
can indicate whether their call has in fact
been resolved. Before they press the button
to confirm, the customer rates, on a scale of
1 to 4, how happy they are with the way their
call was dealt with. The customer can leave
written feedback as well. And if the call hasnt
been resolved? The customer can indicate why
they dont feel their call has been resolved
and the call is returned to the consultant who
worked on it.
Three birds with one stone
This feedback method lets Ctac kill three birds
with one stone: they collect the customers
feedback for each call, its easier for the
customer to click on a rating rather than write
an email, and the process has monitoring for
calls that are resolved but havent been closed.
Consultants used to send an email to the
customer when they believed a call had been
resolved, Huijsen explains. Sometimes the
consultant would forget this step, but more
often the customer would forget to respond.
There was a build-up of calls that didnt get
closed even though the work was done. Now
weve automated the whole process. If the
customer doesnt respond to the first email,
we send a reminder after three days, and
another one after six days. After nine days,
the call is closed automatically.
Benefits to the organization
The new approach has clear benefits for all
parties, Wijers adds. For customers, all it
takes to close a call is to pick a rating, give
additional feedback if they want, and confirm
with a click. Our service desk no longer has Huijsen and Wijers are optimistic for the
to spend time checking whether calls have future of customer satisfaction at Ctac. We
been closed. And potential friction between want to streamline our processes as much
the service desk and consultants is prevented as possible. The only way to know youre
because they dont have to send emails or call successful is if your customer says you are.
back-and-forth about the status of a call. Were meeting our SLAs, but does that mean
we reach our goals? Having the right process
in TOPdesk is a big step towards making sure
Goal-oriented improvements we do. And were working hard on increasing
Ctac uses the feedback they get for different customer satisfaction. After all, happy
purposes. Huijsen: All calls are stored in customers is what its all about.
a database so we can use them to create
reports. To help us find out the scores for each
team, for example. If a customer provides
additional feedback, we always send the
feedback to their consultant. If a customer
gives a low rating, we always give them a
call. We dont want to debate their rating. We
simply want to know why theyre dissatisfied
and we want the customer to know we listen
to them and use their feedback to improve.
This way, we take steps towards providing
better services to our customers.
From collecting to improving
Ctac tested the system internally for six
weeks before rolling it out to ten customers.
The system is now widely used and Huijsen
and Wijers are satisfied. The first challenged
we faced in this transformation was how to
collect data. But we made it work. Now were
working on the next step: we discuss the data
in meetings, we have screens showing how
teams are performing, and our customer care
managers use the input for meetings with
individual customers, says Huijsen
Wijers adds: The more insight and data we
get for customer satisfaction, the more we
can improve our processes. We can compare
priorities and teams to see what we can learn
from each other. The input from customers
is also important to our problem manager.
With more input the problem manager can
identify more problems that would otherwise
go unnoticed.
 TOPDESK MAGAZINE - JUNI 2017 9

We are taking steps

towards providing better
services to our customers.