Measuring Customer Service Improvements

[biboy2012]

1) What tools, tips, techniques, resources, equipment, and the like have you been using on Customer Service that, in your opinion, have mesurably improved the past months or years? Could these performance levels have been achieved without this support? Explain why or why not?

2) Same as question #1, but this time different group/area (internal support team)

Any feedback is appreciated.

[NikkiQSM]

I use a simple customer survey... I send it out twice in a 12 month period..

I used to only send it to our top 20 customers, but then I thought, why not the others.. maybe hearing what the other customers have to say would tell us why we are not getting more business.

The survey lists the usual.. product quality, product packaging, customer service, etc. There is a rating 0 - 5.. and then a section asking what we can do to better serve the customer. This has proved to be benefical information.

We review each and every returned survey at our Management Council Meetings... It is a great way to show all of management what the customers think of us, and also a great way to collaberate a way to fix the issues they point out...

I put all the data together myself.. not really much support if you exclude management council, but it works really well

[biboy2012]

Any other thoughts, Covers?

[CATERAF]

As yet I haven't had the opportunity to implement our customer satisfaction survey for this company, but in previous customer service work and through my uni research I noted a few things that will help you out:

1). Ask Quickly. Always ask the customer very soon after your interaction/dealing with them. People will give you the most information possible when it's fresh in their minds. Leave it until later and you'll lose out on important information that is key to your business (but may not seem crucial to them).

2). Always follow-up later for big/reoccuring customers. The reason for this is your lasting impression. Your lasting impression will show you what you have done exceptionally well or poorly because that's what sticks in their mind. It's very useful to know this to play to your strengths or address your weaknesses.

3). Surveys. Surveys are a fantastic tool but make sure they're not too long - a survey that asks too many pieces of information will get either a poor response rate, people will give up partway through or they will just fly through and won't answer as accurately as possible.

Also ensure surveys (if using a likert scale) use an even number of answers to select from. I.e., give 4 points (strongly disagree, disagree, agree and strongly agree). Having a middle number (number 3 in a 5-point scale, number 4 in a 7-point scale, etc) lets the customer be indecisive and sit on the fence in the middle. A fence sitter is neither here nor there though - they don't tell you much other than that they can't decide. As you want to hear you've given great customer satisfaction, they shouldn't need to sit on the fence.

Also tell them why you're doing the survey and why it's important. You get people on board when they know the point of what they're doing!

Try and use objective measures where possible - i.e., something measureable. You'll get plenty of subjective information in comments but you want to be able to support that with something objective, especially since you said you wanted things that can measureably show improvement.

4). Critical questions. Ask questions about what is important to your company. If speed of delivery is important, then you want to know how satisfied they are with your speed of delivery. There's no point asking questions about those things that aren't crucial to your company - you've only got a few minutes to ask crucial questions so ask them (if also shows them what's important to your company!).

5). Frequency. Ask it as often as necessary without irritating the customer - that means use some common sense. Don't ask them every time they do a purchase if they purchase once a week.. give them a break! For a regular purchase, ask less often. For bigger purchases that are fewer and far between you can probably ask each purchase, or every second.

These are just a few of the things I've thought of that have proven useful when I've measured customer satisfaction before. Hope that helps!