Financial Services company listens to The Voice of the Customer ® with automated customer surveys from VIRTUATell

One of the largest companies in the world, General Electric has a prestigious history and a strong projected future working in areas from jet engines to power generation, financial services to plastics, and medical imaging to news and information. Another area of expertise is that of finance, run by GE Money.It became clear that as part of the overall restructuring a true insight into the experience of their customers at the hands of their automated system would be essential. GE Money, will stand for flexibility and accessibility to their customers, so a true knowledge of strengths and weaknesses will be crucial.

Following a recommendation from other GE divisions using VIRTUATell, GE Money used their telephone customer satisfaction survey service ASMA (Automated Satisfaction Measurement and Analysis) to capture feed-back immediately after the call centre call. An in-depth look at the objectives of GE Money led to a survey design that incorporated a number of features key to GE Money success.

For instance, access to real time results kept the business areas fully engaged with the project – essential to ensure the success of call automation during the final rebranding. Throughout the implementation period, many requests were received to review the results and with VIRTUATell’s real-time analysis web access tool this was possible. This result of this was that not only support of the scheme but that the high level of anticipation regarding the final data ensured that the feedback received would be acted upon.

The design of the survey was also carefully considered, in order to gain maximum feedback from the customer, whilst not taking too much of their time. A key selling point of the survey for GE Money was the verbatim comments. For example, a customer who responded ‘no’ to the question ‘Were they satisfied with the service?’ would then be asked to record a comment as to why. This resulted in invaluable feedback from the customers on specific areas of improvement, with both the qualitative and quantitative data available to justify change.

As a result of the survey, an understanding of areas for potential investment in call automation has proved invaluable in the process of rebranding. This is essential to the progression in order to show customers that it is not just an aesthetic change of name, but a positive change that will have an impact on their dealings with the company. Changes, based on what GE Money know their customers want, are already in progress.

Chris Thackray, Operations Technology Manager of GE Money, said “We had three main objectives. Firstly, to understand customer acceptance as a direct result of our chosen approach, secondly, benchmark results and third, to understand how we manage the results and drive changes. “We’re thrilled with the results we’ve seen from VIRTUATell’s survey. The key thing was that we act on the feedback we’ve received – we want our customers to witness the change driven by their feedback. In fact, during 2005, GE Money will deploy another survey with more exposure to other GE Money products – such as, GE Money MasterCard and Edge, to further help us understand out customers.”

Alan Weaser, Director of VIRTUATell, said “GE are already a valuable client across many European centres and GE Money and Chris have made great use of both our service AND the results. We can capture satisfaction surveys immediately after the call centre transaction but unless the results data is acted upon, the information has no value. It’s due to multinational clients like GE that we are about to open a US operation”, he adds.