Your IndustryAug 28 2013

Top tips to give your business a customer service edge

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With the economy still as unpredictable as ever, and with major organisations going into administration every week, good customer service is more important now than ever for companies not only to survive, but also thrive.

With the business scene as competitive as ever, there is a number of top tips that businesses can use to achieve customer service excellence. Here are our top tips:

Core Values

* When companies identify, agree and embed clear core values, staff start pulling together to achieve better delivery of all aspects of the business, including customer service. Staff and where possible, customers should be involved in agreeing the values.

Broad statements

* Every customer would like a personalised, customised service, whereas the most cost-effective service delivery is ‘one size fits all’. Excellent customer satisfaction should be achieved when the provider strikes the right balance between the two.

* No organisation can provide excellent customer service unless everybody, whatever their function and whatever their place in the hierarchy, recognises they have customers, be they external – or internal.

* No organisation really likes complaints – but they provide unsolicited customer feedback.

* The organisation can learn from such feedback and improve its service delivery. By publishing the actions and service improvements it has taken as a result of complaints and comments, it can demonstrate it is a ‘listening and learning’ organisation, and welcomes customer feedback.

* The received wisdom that ‘customers will pass good customer service on to half a dozen people, while bad customer service gets spread much more widely’, can be turned on its head. A swift, effective resolution of a complaint can transform the customer’s perception.

* It is good practice to empower frontline staff to deal with customer service issues when they arise, if they can – but, if they do, it is important to capture those expressions of dissatisfaction, or ‘informal complaints’ in order to spot any emerging issues that could lead to formal complaints.

* It is not good practice for an organisation to set a cap on the number of complaints that should be received – it sends the wrong message to staff, who may feel they are encouraged to ignore a complaint.

* Another good practice is to encourage customers to submit complaints through all the access channels available, while offering the support of frontline staff to assist them. Channel shift to online service provision, support, information and payment.

* Assuming you have done your customer segmentation, then make sure what the preferred access channel of each segment is – and if it includes customers who cannot, or prefer not to, use online services, then make sure there is a viable alternative for them.

* Use your website to demonstrate your transparency as an organisation by publishing your: Core business standards and your performance against them. Your standards for the timeliness and quality of response to customer contact, and your performance against them. An explanation of any dips in performance, together with any remedial or preventive action you are taking. Action you are taking in response to customer satisfaction surveys, comment cards, and complaints.

Survey fatigue

* Consultation should be a mixture of quantitative (for example, surveys) and qualitative (for example, forums, and focus groups).

* The net promoter score is a particularly useful technique. This is a simple but powerful tool that allows you to track over time the response to the key question: To what extent would your customers recommend your service on a scale of one to 10? This would need to be backed up by more detailed analysis of customer survey data to explore any issues.

* Do not treat your customers as a homogeneous mass. If you have identified customer segment, and you provide various services to them, then the logic is to compare and contrast the relative satisfaction levels of each segment with each service it receives.

* Be sure you know the statistical significance of your survey results – is a 2 per cent year-on-year apparent improvement, a real improvement? But also, be aware the more you dig down into the data (see point above), the less reliable the trend and comparative data becomes.

* Extensive research by Ipsos/Mori has shown that two-thirds of the difference of the levels of customer satisfaction with UK public services is down to five main drivers of customer satisfaction and two other subsidiary drivers. These apply equally to the private sector. Make sure your customer satisfaction surveys cover these drivers – delivery, timeliness, access and the quality of customer service.

* Mystery shopping can be a useful supplementary tool, especially if it is carried out by trained customers.

* The views of the 5 per cent dissatisfied may be worth more than those of the 95 per cent satisfied.

* It is not good practice for the person providing the service to supervise the filling out of a customer survey. This should be done by someone independent.

* If you are regularly getting customer satisfaction ratings above 90 per cent, then it may be lulling you into a false sense of security. Try focusing on raising the level of ‘very satisfieds’.

This should be driven by the top management but embraced by all staff.

* Everybody in the organisation should have a customer-focused key work objective/competence/behaviour in their job description for recruitment and induction, and subsequent performance reviews.

* Again, all staff need to be encouraged to put forward their ideas for service improvement, especially newcomers who bring a new perspective, and management need to show how they have responded to these suggestions.

* Management need to pro-actively recognise (and, if appropriate, reward) staff who suggest customer service improvements or who go beyond the call of customer service duty.

* Senior managers also need to demonstrate regularly, their personal commitment to excellent customer service. Experiencing the customer journey. Every organisation has its process path diagrams, but test out the actual customer journey – the process path may represent the theoretical customer journey but how do you test it in practice? It is important to capture the customers’ experiences: Ask a group of customers to record their emotional highs and lows along their journey. Alternatively, structure a customer survey to ask customers about their experiences and emotions along the journey. As a last resort, ask staff who are not involved to mystery shop the customer journey.

Reducing unnecessary customer contact along their journey should be a key objective for any customer-focused organisation. There are various ways of doing this – customer journey mapping (above) is one example.

Good practice for call centres is to log each call as to whether it could have been avoided by, for example, accessing the website?

Get managers to ‘work the talk’ – do a frontline job for a day or more. Do not rely on your own feedback and management information.

* If you have service standards or a customer charter or pledge always review on an annual basis that you actually delivered them and publicise the results to your customers. This will show your promises are genuine and deliverable and will stop them becoming cosmetic statements. As a result you will deliver excellence.

Chris Tyrrell is an assessor at Customer Service Excellence

Key points

* Good customer service is more important now than it ever has been for companies not only to survive, but also thrive

* Two-thirds of the difference of the levels of customer satisfaction with UK public services is down to five main drivers of customer satisfaction and two other subsidiary drivers

* Everybody in the organisation should have a customer-focused key work objective/competence/behaviour in their job description for recruitment and induction