Be Different or be dead

December 31, 2012

What is the best way to measure the quality of your service?

Source: Pexels

What gets measured gets done. And it’s exceedingly important to measure how well you are serving your loyal customers.

Decide what metric you need to monitor your progress to your goals. Measure regularly. Take action on what you learn from measuring your results.

And never be put off by the argument that you can’t measure what you want to — anything can be measured.

I have seen some measurement systems rely on a formula to derive the service result; it’s not a good idea. I have rarely seen this approach work.

A service objective like X (overall customer satisfaction) = 2Y (where Y could represent how long it takes for a call center rep to answer an incoming call) + 9Z (where Z could represent how long the rep was on the customer call to deal with their request) won’t motivate people to achieve X.

They won’t understand it — how do they know the formula is right? — and won’t have much control over producing the result.

You don’t need a complicated algorithm to drive measurement.

Keep measurement simple. It needn’t require heavy lifting systems technology and records processing. In fact the simpler the better.

Use customer perception surveys as the basis to measure the quality of your customer service.

Declare 3 service elements that are critical to you and ask a customer on a regular basis how you’re doing.

Ask them if their service experience with you was memorable — were they dazzled?

And act on what they say.

Some organizations use internal statistics as the basis of service measurement. For example, the length of time to fulfil an order as determined by the statistics produced by their internal systems.

Although this measure has value, the real question to ask is “How did the customer enjoy the experience of placing their order and receiving the product?”
The order fulfilment time may very well be a good diagnostic tool for unsatisfactory answers to the question.

Be cautious of relying on internal measures as your measurement focus.

Use the customer perception measure — an expression from the market is worth listening to.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 12.31.12 at 10:23 am by Roy Osing
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