A Novel Way to Boost Client Satisfaction

KAGAN MCLEOD

When athletes want to improve, they typically spend hours reviewing video of their
performance. In the white-collar workplace, it’s hard to get such vivid feedback. But in recent
years researchers have learned to mine a unique set of data that serves as a slow-motion
replay of how an organization and its people function: the company’s e-mail, which shows
who talked with whom, why, how, and how often.

Academics call this kind of investigation social network analysis. It has largely focused on
internal communications aimed at learning how colleagues can collaborate most effectively.
A new study uses e-mail analysis for a different purpose: to examine how employees interact
with clients. Organizations can learn what patterns and behaviors affect client satisfaction
and use the results to coach employees on more-effective communications. The researchers
call this work virtual mirroring, because it helps people reflect on their style and compare it
with others’. “This is one of the highlights of 15 years of research in which we show people
their e-mail networks, determine what variables drive performance, and then show how
people can improve their collaboration,” says Peter Gloor, the MIT research scientist who
led the study.

The researchers identified 176 teams working with key client accounts at Genpact, a global
professional services firm spun off from General Electric in 2005. Teams ranged in size from
a few dozen people to several hundred. Twenty-six teams were designated as the
experimental group, with the rest serving as a control; the two groups contained similar types
of client companies (mostly from the Fortune 500) in a variety of industries. At four points
during the study, researchers compiled and analyzed two months’ worth of e-mail between
employees and clients; over the course of two years, they retrieved and examined more than
4.5 million messages in all. The periods during which e-mail was gathered coincided with
the firm’s semiannual customer satisfaction survey, which yielded a Net Promoter Score
indicating how happy each client was with the service provided by its team.

“This Isn’t About Putting People on the Spot”

Each month during the study, team leaders attended a virtual mirroring session lasting 30
minutes to an hour. During it they were shown a scorecard containing key metrics from the
e-mails. These tracked the directness of communication (meaning how frequently employees
answered client questions on their own as opposed to how often they needed to loop in a
supervisor), the simplicity of language in the subject line, the speed with which employees
responded to clients’ messages, and the extent to which clients consistently dealt with a single
employee rather than a rotating cast. The researchers hypothesized that teams with direct
communication, simple language, fast response times, and consistent points of contact would
receive higher Net Promoter Scores than their counterparts, and results showed that this was
true. (A caveat: The researchers did not access the actual text of the e-mails; their semantic
analysis was limited to the subject lines.)

The study’s most important finding involved how the feedback from the virtual mirroring
sessions led to positive changes in behavior. “Employees reduced the complexity of their
language and made their communication with clients much simpler,” says Andrea Fronzetti
Colladon, a professor at the University of Perugia and a coauthor of the study. They also
communicated more directly, responded more quickly, and tried to give clients a single,
consistent point of contact. These changes had a significant effect: Over the course of the
study, teams that participated in the e-mail analysis and mirroring sessions saw client
satisfaction rise by 17% more than teams in the control group.

Although the results suggest that certain e-mail behaviors can improve client satisfaction, the
researchers note that effective behaviors will vary according to context. “In postsales
assistance [the context of the study], you want stable leaders, and you don’t want too much
creativity,” Gloor says. “Clients are asking for an answer to a problem, and they almost
always want an answer from the same person. But in a different context, such as new-product
development, you’d need to have a more creative and more dynamic discussion, and you’d
want to have people rotate more.”

In other studies the researchers broadened their work on e-mail analysis. In one, they
analyzed the e-mail, phone calls, and web conference calls of top-performing salespeople
and found, among other things, that high performers were more likely than their lower-
performing counterparts to turn on the video camera during web calls and that they engaged
in more back-and-forth with clients during those calls. And in another study at Genpact, the
researchers found that e-mail analysis could help them accurately predict (up to five months
in advance) whether an employee would quit—in some cases, they say, identifying that
likelihood before the employee had recognized that he or she might be leaving.
It’s no surprise that the ways in which an employee communicates affect client satisfaction.
Managers can benefit by regarding e-mail as a resource that leaves behind “digital
breadcrumbs” that can be systematically analyzed. Like watching a video of your golf swing,
sometimes looking in the mirror and studying your flaws provides valuable lessons in how
to improve.