Effective ways to measure customer service
“You did a great job today! Mrs X just gave us a glowing review when she checked out. She mentioned your name for providing outstanding customer service. Well done!”
Receiving positive feedback like this never fails to leave you with a warm glow that lasts for the rest of your day. If you were to receive this message from your manager, you would no doubt go home with a bounce in your step! I know when I get positive feedback from delegates who have been on my training programmes, the feel good factor stays with me long after the event. This is one of the many extraordinary impacts that measuring customer service can have on your organisation.
How do you know if you have delivered a good service to your customers?
Measuring customer service is the only way to understand if you are truly satisfying your customers’ needs, wants and desires. It’s also one of the most effective ways to motivate a team and support their growth and development - an opportunity for you to recognise team performance and create a lasting feel good factor - leading to higher levels of service.
If your people don’t receive feedback to understand how they are doing and where they could improve, customer service levels will stagnate. The only way to improve (and continually improve) customer service is to measure it.
Traditional methods of measuring service
Online customer review platforms like Tripadvisor, Trustpilot and Google are all important places for businesses to gather insight into their customer experience. Customers may also pass verbal comments direct to staff members or provide written feedback via surveys. As a management team you might choose to gather information using mystery shoppers. With the exception of the mystery shopper, all these feedback channels depend on customers feeling motivated to leave your business a review. Personally, I rarely leave reviews. Do you?
Let’s think about what motivates a customer to leave a review. Customers generally tend to write a review on feedback sites when they have had a very positive or a very negative experience. Average experiences don’t feature as often (and there is nothing worse than an average experience!). Take a look. How many 3-star reviews do you see online?
Paper surveys and online questionnaires also require a level of effort to complete. Most of us are bombarded with them on a daily basis, so unless someone has strong feelings about their experience you can’t rely on every customer to complete one.
This means that organisations need to take the initiative and implement their own fair and objective way to measure service; to find a way to help your team to know what good service looks and feels like for your customers. Developing a measure that gives a true picture of the service you are striving to achieve will guide you and your team towards elevated service levels.
How do you measure customer service?
‘Exceptional Service Makes Sense... Business Sense’ provides all the tools a business needs to measure service levels and standards and ensure you always have current, quality insight into the service you are providing.
Here’s a sneak preview...
We start by creating a set of 10 Service Standards, share them with the team, and then assess each other and ourselves against them.
Create a scoreboard to highlight success against each of the standards, and (most importantly) recognise and celebrate your collective achievements.
Share evidence of what best practice looks like across all areas of the business.
We upgrade the 10 Service Standards to a new set of 10, and repeat the process.
Why the 10 Service Standards method works
I’ve introduced this into teams I’ve worked with and the results have been remarkable. It works because it’s a simple process that involves the whole team in its creation and development. But the real secret to its success is consistency. It requires collective determination to keep the standards on track, yet it doesn’t require a huge amount of effort to implement on a daily basis. It means the whole team comes together and becomes motivated to continuously improve.
Service Standards in a hotel
When I was working in a hotel, we delivered a project to rebrand a lounge area. We agreed and trained all staff in the new service standards for the lounge area. Everyone in the team has a say in, and contributed to, creating the 10 Service Standards.
My role involved visiting the lounge area once or twice a week to check whether the new standards were being achieved. On my first visit a colleague asked what I was doing. I took her through the 10 Service Standards and explained what good looked like for each.
Later in the week when I re-visited the lounge are, the same colleague took the sheet of paper from me and checked off the Service Standards herself. Bingo! She was engaged and motivated to achieve the measures we had put in place. On my next visit, I didn’t need to stick around. I just passed her the sheet and she did the rest.
Within three months the 10 Service Standards were embedded in the customer service culture of the business. This could be you.
Discover more about the 10 Service Standards
Implementing an effective, easy to follow, measure of customer service and customer experience is crucial if your organisation wants to improve levels of service delivery. Compared to traditional methods of gathering feedback, Zest for Life’s objective Service Standards have a strong track record of achieving success. If you would like to understand more about this measure or talk about improving customer experience, book a free discovery call, purchase the book, or contact us here.