How to measure the quality of your customer service

Customer service is a vital aspect of successful businesses. When considering your own customer service, how can you tell if you’re achieving the highest level of quality or not?

Customer service managers can provide a certain level of training and incentives, but it’s pointless if the worth and effectiveness of such processes aren’t measured. Without monitoring, it’s impossible to tell which areas of customer service need improvement and which areas are working. And worse, staff could be making habitual mistakes because they’re not being properly measured.

Sales numbers

One of the easiest and most common metrics for measuring the quality of your customer service is analysing sales numbers. Satisfied customers tend to purchase more products, so if you notice that your sales are increasing, it could be attributed in part to your level of service.

Self-concept as an approach

When phoning a business these days, it’s the norm to encounter a message that sounds something like: “Your call may be recorded for quality purposes.” When employees know that their work is being monitored, they are more likely to bring the same high quality of work to their desk every day, and to every call they take. Monitoring also provides valuable information that can be used to better train customer service employees and push their service skills to the next level.

Number of complaints

Some companies evaluate their quality of service by the number of complaints they receive. Generally speaking, when the number of disgruntled customers has decreased, it’s because the quality of customer service has increased. It’s critical to your business’ success to manage customer dissatisfaction and keep at a minimal level. If you don’t you could end up with a bad reputation and a happy competitor.

Talk to customers

Engaging with customers will help you to understand them – and then you can tweak your customer service when necessary. Monitoring the health of your good customer relationships is just as important as dealing with the negative relationships. Ask for feedback after interactions so that you can find out what your customers want, then make sure to actually incorporate their feedback where relevant.

Online statistics

If you do business online, your analytics can provide invaluable information on your customers’ behaviour. You can determine when, why and how people are visiting your site. You can see the transition from first time visitor, to serious prospect, to customer, to repeat or regular customer. With this information, you can see where customer service fits into that process and how you can improve it to get more results.

No matter what kind of metrics you currently measure, you should be able to identify and change areas of your customer service. Customer service is one the key elements in a company that wants to get repeat business, so it’s not a department to be overlooked. Measure, change, and engage.

Not all businesses have the size or time to develop a fully qualified and high quality customer service department. Have you considered outsourcing this service to a company with trained staff and a track record of successful projects?

For more information please call us on 01962 658305 or email enquiries@processflows.co.uk.