POSTED BY MEREDITH ESTEP ON THU, MAY 12, 2011 @ 01:51 PM
Customer service is a vital component to any successful business today, but how do you know if you are making the grade with your own quality of customer interactions? Measuring your customer service is an important step to ensuring consistency and quality in all your company's dealings with their most important asset.
There are many good ways to accurately assess the quality of your customer service, and we have five of them right here.
Consider Your Supply and Demand
One of the easiest metrics for measuring the quality of your customer service is simply your number of sales. Happy customers tend to purchase more products, so if sales are increasing, it could be attributed in part to your level of service.
However, this method alone will not give you the most accurate assessment on the quality of service; an increase in sales could also be attributed to the season, economic climate or recent price markdown. This gauge is more effective when combined with other measurement tools.
Ask Your Customers
One way to determine whether customers are happy with your level of service is to simply ask them. You can do this informally, by inquiring when they come into your establishment. You can offer follow-up phone calls or emails to ask customers about the quality of their last visit to your business. Or you can make the process more formal by creating surveys that ask questions about different aspects of your service and ask customers to fill them out and return them to you.
Number of Customer Complaints
Some companies evaluate the quality of service by the number of complaints they receive. A common assumption is that when the number of disgruntled customers is decreased, that the quality of services has increased. Take note: by not paying attention to your quality of service, you may be inadvertently sending those disgruntled customers down the street to a competitor.
Identify Your Weaknesses
Effective measurement of the quality of your customer service will help you identify specific weaknesses within your operation. For example, perhaps customers are not happy with the length of time they have to wait for assistance, or they are frustrated because a certain product always seems to be on backorder. No matter what metric tool you use to evaluate your current level of service, it should be able to help you identify very specific areas where you have room for improvement.
Assess the Competition
Knowing what your competitors are offering in terms of customer service can also help you know whether you are on track with your own service level. Send an employee down the street to act as a customer and find out how they are treated. Talk to customers who have worked with both businesses and ask them which company's service they like better and why.
Measuring your customer service will help you know if your service level is on par and where it can be improved. Through these easy tools, you can get an accurate idea of whether the quality of your customer service is where it needs to be or what you can do to raise the bar on your current service level.
-Meredith Estep
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