"Do You Know Your Rage Metrics? I'm Sure Your Customers Do!"

Rage Metrics refer to the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that measure the frustration and negative effects of the user experience encountered by your customers. More directly, Rage Metrics tell us where and how much our UI/UX and Customer Support experiences drive our customers crazy. Rage Metrics are important because they tell companies exactly what to fix to have a big impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you don’t know your Rage Metrics, you need a better dashboard because we're sure that your customers are telling you what they are most frustrated by. You just need the proper listening posts to capture the insights.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the most critical Rage Metrics in the contact center and on your website that commonly affect your customer experience, along with tips to fix the problems.

Unhelpful IVRs - This common problem tops the list for nearly every customer “rage point.” Most companies do a terrible job with the IVR messages, prompts and selections in their IVR that creates a terrible customer experience at the exact wrong time for your customer. Imagine your customer’s perspective when they receive a dramatically high bill perhaps indicating a leak in their main water line that pushes their budget to the breaking point. Now, imagine that customer’s mindset when they reach an IVR with a long recorded message telling them that their choices have recently changed (when they haven’t), plus a reminder to learn more about the privacy policy on the company website, and followed by a request to first visit the website “My Account” page or download a mobile app for more information. We're sure that your customer reaches peak anxiety just before learning that billing questions are number 5 or 6 on the list of IVR choices. Consider how this type of IVR experience drives up a customer’s rage metric.

Helpful IVRs get right to the point, make only a cursory segue to the website, and rank customer choices according to the relative volume of each call type to give customers a more responsive and effective IVR experience. A helpful IVR demonstrates that the utility understands customers’ needs and builds intuitive experiences to support them.

Ignoring Repeat Calls - For an industry so indexed to first call resolution (FCR) metrics, any utility company that doesn’t tune its telephony and customer service processes to identify frequent repeat callers in a short period of time misses a critical rage scenario. A customer calling repeatedly to the customer service line over the span of a few minutes clearly is having a difficult customer service experience, and each repeat call that ends without a positive resolution fans the flames of consumer rage. That customer is having a difficult time getting through an IVR, especially if some of their choices end in a terminated call without reaching a human caller.

Airlines have done an exceptional job of leveraging smart telephony to monitor this type of metric and noting when a call from a particular inbound telephone number repeats frequently in a short time period. By the third return call, the switch routes that customer call to an expedited queue to be answered by a human being or “smarter” IVR with better grooming for these edge cases. If you don’t know how many customers call the customer service line repeatedly in a day, we invite you to ask for that report on your CS dashboard. Results will probably surprise you, and point right to a pain point that you can fix in your customer service experience.

Indifferent IVRs - We are all customers of different brands, so we all call customer service departments occasionally and reach an IVR that just doesn’t seem to listen to us. Perhaps it’s the type that asks for a voice or keypad response, then doesn’t really recognize what you tell it. Other IVRs offer limited choices that don’t match your needs, such as leading with “Do you need technical support” questions but never let you choose to report an outage or ask a billing question. Most customers indicate their frustration in these situations by loudly saying “REPRESENTATIVE” into their phones or pressing “0” repeatedly to get to a human being. We’ve seen abundant data in some of the most annoying IVRs that show customers holding down the “0” key out of utter discouragement.

Now, imagine that customer’s rage score if the IVR says something like “I can’t recognize your input, let’s try again” or worse, just tells the customer “have a good day” then terminates the call. What technology could quickly identify as a moment of anxiety for the customer and route to a representative to solve their problem otherwise turns to a moment of peril in the customer relationship and an indelible mark on the utility's customer rage metric.

Customers leave that experience confident that the service provider doesn’t care at all about their needs. Check your reporting to learn how often in a day your IVR shows indifference to your customer, and close those loops for an immediate improvement in the CSAT score and a lower rage metric. You may not win back the love of previous customers, but at least you can stop the pain in the future.

Chatbot Doom Loops - Many energy and water utilities have yet to embrace chat as a customer service channel, but telecom and Internet providers have long leveraged chat to increase digital self-service and reduce calls to the contact center. Chat powered by a chatbot can be a very efficient support channel for common questions, but beware the “Doom Loops.”

A Doom Loop happens when a customer gets stuck in a repetitive series of questions without getting closer to a resolution to their problem. Imagine clicking chat to report an outage of your internet service or to request a bill credit for the lost time. Chatbots sometimes face rigid policies requiring customer verification before offering any advice. Here’s an example:

Customer: I need to report an outage.

Chatbot: Thank you for contacting us about the outage. To help you effectively, please click the following link and log into “My Account.”

Customer: I don’t have the app.

Chatbot: You can download the mobile app in the Apple App Store or Android Store.

Customer: I just want to get a billing credit.

Chatbot: I can help you with your bill credit. What is the service related to the credit:

Internet Service

Mobile Service

Customer: Internet Service

Chatbot: To help you effectively, please click the following link and log into “My Account.”

Customer: I don’t have the app.

Chatbot: You can download the mobile app in the Apple App Store or Android Store.

Customer: Can I speak to a representative?

Chatbot: I can connect you with a representative. I just need a bit more information about the reason for your visit to route you to the appropriate team. Please tell me the reason for your visit today.

Customer: I have an outage and want to receive a credit on my bill.

Chatbot: I can help you with your bill credit. What is the service related to the credit:

Internet Service

Mobile Service

Customer: INTERNET SERVICE

Chatbot: To help you effectively, please click the following link and log into “My Account.”

Customer: REPRESENTATIVE…

Of course, we can all relate to this type of experience, and our upcoming generation of customers among Millennials and GenZ users prefer chat over human contact for nearly all customer service engagements, so we have a good reason to embrace the technology. Just be sure to do it properly. Check with your provider to identify how many of this type of Doom Loop your customers currently experience. If you don’t already have a chatbot for customer service, be sure to ask your vendors how they monitor these issues and transition anxious or frustrated customers to a representative seamlessly. It’s a simple issue to fix once you begin tracking the problem.

Often overlooked by typical Voice of the Customer reporting or operational dashboards, rage metrics give Customer Service leaders a roadmap of the most common and critical elements of the CX that otherwise go unreported. Instead of daunting, rage metrics provide an incredibly helpful insight about the pain points that cause customers the most distress in a company’s customer service systems. We summarized three of the most common overlooked pain points that also have some of the easiest fixes. The road to recovery starts by tweaking your technology and reporting to find those critical potholes in the customer experience. Then, it’s a matter of putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and adjusting your CX to eliminate those issues and make your utility easier for customers to get the help they need. Your customers and their CSAT scores will respond quickly and positively to the improved experiences. For more information about Rage Metrics, please subscribe for our updates and watch for the newest articles, or contact us for some help.