According to Mohammadi, an unsatisfied customer hurts the business and Digikala does its best to minimize the number of these customers
According to the IDEA, based on DigiKala’s performance report in 2022, 83% of the participants in the recommender index survey responded to the question, “How likely are you to recommend shopping from DigiKala to others?” They gave a score of 7 to 10. These numbers and other statistics published on the level of satisfaction of Digikala’s customers and sellers were obtained by Digikala’s “customer experience” team. Next, you will read Digiato’s interview with “Mehran Mohammadi”, the senior manager of Digikala’s customer experience team.
In the cyberspace, criticisms are coming to the customer support department of Digikala, which reports on the unpleasant experience of the customer. How trained are your support staff about customer-centricity and creating an experience?
Our employees at the support and after-sales service center have a training course upon arrival and are not directly connected to the line before completing these trainings. Also, based on a ranking, it is determined what calls to answer so that they can use their potential. In addition, if the customer does not reach a result with the primary employee of the call center department, he can register his request for access to the complaint unit. In this unit, there are more specialized forces with higher QC score to guide customers.
We also have a quality control team. The members of this team measure the quality of the conversation based on a series of elements. For example, the beginning of the conversation, the tone of support, the length of the conversation and its end are scored and based on that, they determine which colleague needs retraining. In addition, in cases where our employee’s conflict with the customer is high, it may also lead to termination of cooperation.
Another mechanism we have is that our team, the customer experience team, surveys the customer ratings after the call. One of our duties is to supervise the quality control. During this survey, if a colleague has received a low rating from a customer, we ask him to share his reaction and measure the time to improve his performance.
The tone and attitude of our colleague is not the most important cause of dissatisfaction in the call center; In fact, what is important to us is solving the customer’s problem; This means that all the skills of our colleagues in the call center show themselves in solving the customer’s problem. We have about 20,000 to 30,000 calls daily, and some of these people have had a bad experience; Experiences that cannot be repaired with the appropriate tone and manner; But the only thing that matters is solving the problem.
How does your team interact with other teams to create a good customer experience?
We have several approaches. In the first step, we try to find weaknesses and improvement areas in each of these approaches based on the customer journey map. For example, when a customer calls us, the weak point may be the inappropriate tone of our employee. Or, for example, when the courier delivers the order, the weak point can be not delivering the goods to the home despite the customer’s request.
Also, finding improvement areas is one of the other things that are investigated with this approach. The purpose of this index is to find points where there is not necessarily a problem, but if you provide a service, you create a better experience for the customer; For example, birthday greetings to customers via SMS. These improve the experience and make the customer a brand lover. Every business needs to provide these services to the customer to compensate for the bad experiences that are unintentionally created for the customer.
At the same time, it is necessary to make sure that the voices of customers are heard by all units. All units must know the results of their interaction with the customer and realize how much they influence the customer experience. Here we try to measure the key performance indicator. For example, in the case of the call center, the percentage of people who are tired of waiting in line and end the call is one of these indicators. In general, we have about 30 to 40 of these indicators.
We show units what we call quality control output (like customer feedback) and based on that we try to minimize weaknesses. Wherever, for various reasons, a unit may have a conflict of interest with customer experience quality control indicators, we try not to overlook anything by presenting it at the DHD level. Sometimes it may not be within the organization’s power to eliminate bad experiences, but at least we can recognize all the problems.
It seems that the support part is the most important part as this communication link; How do you cover the weaknesses of this section?
We believe that the call center and the delivery department have the most face-to-face and physical contact with the customer. This is very important to us. We review quality control indicators and are sensitive to customer experiences. The work of the support service is to identify problems and solve them. Our job is to make sure issues are resolved by support in a timely manner.
We also periodically monitor our Call Center Quality Control Indicators and Support Quality Control Indicators to ensure that the scores we receive are accurate and to determine what we should be performing based on these scores. to improve. Another focus point for us is to review after-sales service to ensure that customer return requests are not rejected for the wrong reasons.
In the customer experience department, how many people are the teams?
We have two teams; One is the core customer experience team (digikala.com), which is managed by “Homa Meghiasi”. One is the customer experience team of the group, which includes DigiExpress, DigiP and DigiKalajet. Our concentration and control in these groups is much less than that of Digikala. Digikala has been operating for about 10 years, but Digikala’s other services are relatively new. For example, DigiP, which is the oldest service, has about two years of customer experience and naturally has less staff.
It has been about a week that a new team named “Sales Experience” has been added to us. There is now a team called the Heads platform, which continues to be an important part of the seller experience there. All together, we are about 20 people. But we have ten members in the core team.
In fact, the tasks related to the operator are assigned to this (central) team. This means that this team is in charge of project management; Defines the management roadmap and ensures its implementation. Most of us in this team define the projects well, but because we don’t have a roadmap for success, we don’t notice the quality of the project and we only focus on finishing it.
One of the most important reasons why we shouldn’t get too involved in the project is to avoid conflicts of interest. That is, it should not be the case that we just want to finish our responsibilities and not pay attention to the quality of the work. Our job should not be just to define the project; Rather, a system must work properly and all employees and managers complete their projects in the best possible way.
Many of the factors that cause your customer dissatisfaction are in the hands of issues that are almost out of your control. How do you explain these things to the customer?
One of our measures to solve these challenges was to present a customer experience report at the Digikala online event. One of the goals of this incident was for us to be transparent and accept that e-commerce in the world and Digikala will eventually face a series of errors and a percentage of customers are harmed every day for various reasons. But the fact is that we don’t like these things to happen and we are trying to solve these problems.
Many people who work at DigiCala know that we are not happy about these developments. Some time ago, we conducted an analysis under the title of improving the performance of the customer experience, during which we examined the effect of the elements with which we measure the customer experience (such as NPS, etc.) on the elements of the financial indicators and the health of our business.
We conducted this analysis and shared it with all stakeholders. We also try to periodically update the customer experience report and show that we know the problems and are working to reduce them. We do not claim that we can eliminate problems, so we ask customers to accompany us.
Meanwhile, we are trying to talk more about these issues. After all, we are a marketplace; Several million products (with several delivery models) can be purchased in DigiKala. What we do is to make elements that contribute to a good customer experience (like seller ratings) more visible.
In addition, we are making a series of tutorial videos where customers can use more filters. We strive to improve processes by being transparent, honest, and promoting a good customer experience and all the tasks of identifying quality control criteria. A series of elements, such as the delay in sending orders, should be reduced, and a series of other elements, such as the NPS index or satisfaction with product quality, should be increased.
In addition to being the trusted advisor, we must show the good and bad performance of the sellers. Along with this, we should know that the features of digital marketing are much more than its negative features. The fact is that without the presence of sellers, the variety of products available in Digikala would be very limited.
How do you return an angry and upset customer to the Digikala basket? What issues do you consider to be the cause of customer’s aggressive behavior?
There are several processes for this. One of the most important indicators of quality control for us is the customer loss rate, which is done periodically. We try to prevent it from increasing by identifying this case. While in marketing, there are a series of processes to prevent the loss of customers, which are defined based on customer segmentation (the mature customer segment includes customers with the largest number of purchases, the largest amount of money paid, and the most frequent ones) for purchase, we prefer all customers to be among mature customers. be us If a customer moves from one tier to a lower tier in the customer segment, this is a signal and we need to do something to bring him back. The fact is that customer experience is not part of making money in a business, but part of keeping customers, and we know that the future of our business depends on this.
Our biggest competitor is the offline market. It may be thought that Digikala has no competitors; But the reality is not like this. Except for one or two industries, the rest of the industries are not completely monopolized. Offline market always has a bigger market. Besides, the existence of Raghib in the market is a pleasant thing for us.
A number of people think that customer experience means that the product does not reach the customer late; But the reality is that this concept is much more than that. Customer experience includes accessibility; To know whether we have the product or not, how complete is the competitive prices and production content? Are there enough comments for customer experiences or not and… In fact, customer experience is not just for after service.
How different is the experience of using digital goods in Tehran and other cities? It is good that people in distant cities can buy the same product as in Tehran, but the logistics issue is a lot of trouble for these people, which leads to a bad experience. What have you done in this regard?
Customer experience in cities or small towns depends on a number of things. For example, their delivery time may be one or two days longer. Either they don’t ship immediately or the return process takes longer. But things like broadcasting and timely delivery are more in cities than in Tehran. In addition, most of the cities are more satisfied with us than Tehran; Because in the city, due to the fact that various options are not available, it is good for them to buy their desired product from Tehran with a difference of a few days.
The high variety of products in the Digikala market creates a value. Therefore, the customer experience cannot be considered a small matter, but this possibility should be compared with competitors and other possibilities for shopping.
It seems that dissatisfied customers always reflect their opinions more than satisfied customers in cyberspace and these opinions become widespread. Do you agree with this? Why does this happen?
Research has confirmed this, showing that every complaining customer gets (reduces) 11 or 13 new customers. Consent usually doesn’t drive advertising, it’s the fandom that drives advertising. An unsatisfied customer hurts the business, and this is one of the reasons why we want to reduce this dissatisfaction. This is the life factor of any business in a transparent market.
The surveys we receive from our customers mostly include two categories; More satisfied customers and more dissatisfied customers. Customers who fall in the middle are less likely to participate in our measurements. Of course, this depends on the way of measurement. In the active measurement (call), everyone picks up the phone, but in the anonymous survey (SMS or online), the two mentioned groups participate more. The point is that learning it is more important for us; This inclusiveness should be improving.
It is important for us that our methodology is consistent and that we have active surveys and check it. Social networks are not a reliable platform to show satisfaction. For example, no one dares to talk about the goodness of a platform on Twitter. Of course, this does not mean to ignore the opinions reflected in social networks, but we should not generalize these opinions and we should find another way to navigate. Every media has its own audience.
Digikala is known for using technology. Are technologies such as artificial intelligence used in the discussion of customer experience?
DigiNext is the technical arm of DigiKala. We have two ongoing projects with this service. One of our projects with artificial intelligence is the text-to-voice and voice-to-text bot; That is, where the customer calls, we can convert the voice into text and use it in our analysis. We can even leave the issue of quality control to the machine. Even a series of robots have the ability to recognize the type of tone and the level of anger of the employee. As a result, its analysis becomes easier.
Another project that was recently launched is a project related to a series of keywords. When customers have given positive or negative comments about the quality of a product, this positive or negative feature is categorized by these keywords. Another project we have ourselves is to aggregate and analyze the comments we get on NPS and the site to give us clues.
For example, some keywords show that the product we are selling has a 70% probability of contradiction; For example, four people have talked about it and all four people have used this word in their comments. Or, for example, we put a product and 10 were sold, and 50% commented on it, while a normal product receives 5 comments out of every 100 sales. This means that the product was either very good or very bad.
These keywords can have such uses for us that we are now in the display stage and we are moving forward step by step; Although we are not sure what we are getting at. By next year, we will probably go to chatbots. We are also sensitive about not launching something that improves a series of indicators but does not actually solve the customer’s problem.
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