My background includes working in a call-center environment, which is a metrics-driven environment.
So let’s say that the following is stated on a business-development questionnaire:
Do you agree or strongly agree? Are customer-service metrics a way for organizations to accurately measure the effectiveness of their customer service strategies?
Given my background and knowledge, I would select “strongly agree,” and I’ll explain by starting out with two primary reasons:
- In times like these—during a severe recession—it’s more important than ever to retain customers, particularly those returning customers. For sure you want to know where you stand and how customers are feeling about the levels of service that you are providing.
- Regardless of the times or economic conditions, you want ways to measure customer satisfaction and, most importantly, dissatisfaction.
I’ll elaborate on number two above. When customers are dissatisfied, you basically have two groups of people known as the ‘walkers’ and the ‘talkers.’
Your talkers will actively confront you with any problems or issues that they may have with your services. They will bring those straight to your attention.
On the other hand, your walkers will normally want to avoid raising a fuss over any issue. So, they will simply walk away and look for comparable services/costs from the competition.
The above brief customer-profile analysis brings us back around to the basic goal for implementing customer service metrics.
You want to be able to reach out to those walkers and turn the walkers in to talkers. This way, you can learn more about the concerns of those walkers and hopefully keep them from leaving your business for the competition.
What more should a business know about customer service metrics?
First, you can view this topic by looking at it from two angles:
- Internal customer service metrics
- External customer service metrics
Internal considerations: It is important to keep in mind that regardless of what your customers are saying, you definitely want to put strong internal practices into place.
For instance, you will want to find ways to improve your employees’ customer service skills and their customer service effectiveness. Those objectives are givens, regardless of what feedback you are getting from clients and customers.
Next, you will want internal measurements in place, which you will also monitor. And when we think about monitoring, we are also thinking about developing the means for measuring and scoring.
Measuring and monitoring also serve to inspire employees so that they will feel accountable. When employees feel accountable and they are achieving high levels of constant service, then you will also want to reward and recognize them.
External considerations: First you will want to ask yourself two questions that relate to data collection: (1) Do I want to gather a great amount of information from a smaller number of customers; or (2) Do I want to gather a lesser amount of information, but from a greater number of customers?
Once you’ve considered those two questions, let’s say you decide on the second approach. You will then conduct a quick survey that asks respondents to rate—say, on a scale of one to five—various areas of customer service elements. Then, you can distribute those short surveys to a sizeable number of people. Most likely, you can expect to get greater participation this way, but you can also expect to receive minimal information.
On the flip side, if you distribute a more comprehensive survey, you will gain information of increased value and depth; but you should also expect fewer people to respond. In other words, not as many people will want to spend the time and energy required for responding to a lengthier survey.
In closing, how you determine which method to use also depends on numerous variables such as: your business, your products, your services and your customers or clients. If your business involves selling products with little or no process complications, then you might be able to get what you need from a scaled-down version.
On the other hand, if yours is a service organization, you may need to determine how employees are doing for your customers on a day-to-day basis. In such situations, you will need a higher functioning tool in order to get sufficient information for evaluation purposes.
In my next HRTools.com Insight, I will review examples based on experiences; along with the importance of analyzing customer-service metrics data. It is very important to know what to do with that information in order to make necessary and meaningful changes well before you lose those valuable clients or customers out the door.