Author: Barb Lyon

Customer Service is just one piece of the entire Customer Experience. When was the last time you or someone in your organization became a ‘new’ customer of yours? The Customer Experience starts before the contract is signed and lasts throughout your relationship and with every department that customer may interface.

Like walking into your living room with a new set of discriminating eyes, I’ll bet you’d find something that just isn’t right. Similarly, by stepping through your customer experience with an outsider’s point of view you will find opportunities to improve the experience for your new customers’ experience.

All this talk about customer experience these days is not new at all. Mystery shoppers were created with this concept in mind. Here is a short list of companies who are known for creating an outstanding customer experience: Hilton Hotels, Apple, Nordstrom, Amazon.com, Zappos.com. These companies make their customers feel special regardless of whether it is a new transaction or an interface with a different department in the organization.

It’s all in the kool aid. The employee base at these companies know how important their customers are. It is part of the company culture….from the top down. Customer Experience is THE Differentiator for these leading and quite successful companies.

The ability—or inability—for a company to serve its customers in a way that is consistent with meeting or beating their expectations will prove to be the ultimate differentiator that separates the corporate winners from the losers in the near future. Joseph Jaffe

Mull over this quote and next time we’ll discuss strategies for creating a differentiating Customer Experience.

Let’s be clear: if you’re not measuring any part of your service delivery, you are missing a huge opportunity to improve, grow or even save your business during these scrutinizing, tight economic times.

The challenge with specifying key indicators is that not all businesses will use the top customer service metrics. For example, a retail or fulfillment organization will have decidedly different key performance indicators than a software-as-a-service company.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have highlighted relatively general and important customer service metrics and incorporated a few varying perspectives for different use cases.

Service Level

For call centers, support, and service desks, the first call resolution is the Holy Grail. For a shipping operation, product delivery, and project implementation, on-time performance is the measuring stick. In a high-transaction business, the first interaction with a customer experience will be a key determinant of whether customer satisfaction will return with the first contact resolution rate of the customer support team. Don’t underestimate the importance of timeliness and thoroughness.

Customer Retention

For SaaS businesses, Utilization is the best indicator of a customer’s dedication to your service. Use this metric to understand who is at risk at contract renewal time. Monitoring Repeat Business is going to help non-SaaS businesses understand how sticky their product or service is for their customer effort score base. You should know which customers are using or buying different parts of your business to see the net promoter score. These customers who buy throughout your offerings are perhaps your most important to track customer satisfaction to focus on for your retention strategies with the exceptional customer service you provide.

Response time

You’d be surprised how many customer satisfaction surveys come back with comments such as “your service is great, you got back to me right away….” “I was surprised with how quickly you responded to my inquiry and it made all the difference even if I didn’t get the answer I was hoping for…” In today’s world of electronic relationship management, response time to the customer service team is one of the only ways we can communicate our sense of urgency and concern for our customers with our product or service. What is your Response goal – within X hours? Set one and achieve it. You should know what your competition is doing and beat their goal.

Want to really blow away a customer and cement your relationship? Pick up the phone and give them a personal call.

Time with the Customer

Are your customer-facing employees incentivized to keep calls short or to move too quickly from customer to customer? If so, you are sending the wrong message and subsequently affecting the quality of the customer interaction. There is a definite happy medium between the overly chatty service provider and the thorough and efficient provider like the customer service representative or customer service teams. Set your benchmarks for call duration and general time with the customer in relation to the ultimate goal of first call resolution, NOT the other way around.

In other words, a completely satisfied customer with great customer service agents not requiring a follow-up call or visit is much preferred over a quick, unresolved interaction.

Churn 

Cancellations and returns are the equivalents of customer churn. If you don’t know how much business you are losing, you won’t be able to understand how much new business you will require to stay out of the red. As important as knowing how much, is understanding WHY you are losing customers. Take it to the next level and use follow-up surveys, phone calls, and personalized ‘how can we get you back’ emails. This survey information is real business insight for understanding your lost business.

By all means, this is not a comprehensive list of key performance indicators. To expand further we would need to focus on a particular business model to provide a more granular perspective. Start measuring and start making changes. Continue to evolve your key customer support metrics as your business evolves. Keep this process circular for continuous improvement.

Post these key performance indicators in your facility or on your intranet and regularly communicate them to your employee base to give everyone in your Company sensitivity to how you are performing for your most important asset: your Customers.

As always your comments are encouraged and appreciated. What are your key metrics?

The first question you should ask yourself…How do you measure customer satisfaction?

If you are measuring by the # of complaints you are or are not receiving, you are in trouble. Not everybody bothers to take the time to tell you about his/her horrible experience. If you are asking your customers if they are satisfied, you are telling them that their satisfaction matters.

There are many different ways to ask: post-purchase and post-support surveys, enclosures in the monthly invoice, follow-up phone calls, and quarterly or annual surveys. The right method depends on your business and your customer base in customer service skills. Try different ways. Just do it.

4 Tenets For Your Customer Service Mission

A few basic rules about customer service:

Honesty is the Best Policy. Integrity

Be honest and own up to your mistakes. Communicate what you plan to do to change or prevent the same mistake from happening again. Don’t be fooled into believing that a regular ‘mea culpa’ will get you off the hook. At some point, the plan to fix the problem must take effect because customer service is important always!

Break Glass in Case of Fire. Response Time

The best tact is to quickly get on the phone with the customer to explain your company’s mistake and accept their customer feedback. Don’t rely on email for this communication if it can be done quickly one on one. If you are communicating to a large customer base then email is certainly the fastest and most effective way to quickly notify your customers that you are aware of the problem. Frequent updates if there is a protracted issue and a brief overview of how you will prevent it from happening in the future will give your customers confidence that you are aware of the customer impact as the customer service manager with the customer support team.

Keeping it Real. Set a Realistic Expectations

Customers who have been promised something that isn’t delivered as promised are far more frustrated and disappointed than if they are notified at the outset they won’t have it sooner than later. In other words, under-promise and over-deliver is the best policy. This may take some arm wrestling with other departments who want to take a feature or product to market before it is ready. Set the expectations correctly internally as to what the fallout may be so everyone understands the impact on customer satisfaction and ultimately customer retention with the excellent service you provide.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Everyone in your company should love your customers. Without them, you have no company. This doesn’t mean you won’t have difficult customers who will push the limits and try everyone’s patience. But if you don’t have a company philosophy to respect and appreciate your customers for great customer service, the opposite tone will infect customer interactions from all departments specifically with the customer service professionals or the customer service managers. All departments, customer-facing or not, should care about customer satisfaction and good customer service.

From Gandhi, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.”

Use these 4 tenets as the foundation for your excellent customer service mission. What do you do to ensure your customers are treated as your most important asset with your exceptional service? When will you say why customer service important?

Welcome to the new Customer Service discussion:

Servicing a customer is a part of every purchase and interaction with internal and external contacts. It can last a few seconds up to hours. So if we all do it and experience it everyday in almost everything we do, why isn’t good customer service the norm?

We all have stories about when we were treated exceptionally well or extremely poorly. We tend to share these extraordinary stories with others. We all know that word of mouth marketing can be the absolute best advantage, or the worst drawback for a company.

Warren Buffett said it best:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. “

We are going to explore how to create a customer service experience that is extraordinary for your customers and the norm for your business. My goal is to guide you to look at these issues in a new way and to encourage you to get creative about how to make every interaction a memorable service to the customer.

Some Upcoming Topics for Discussion:

• Customer Service vs Customer Experience
• Customer Service Strategies as a Differentiator
• Creating a Customer Centric Culture
• Attributes of a Leader in Customer Service

I fully expect this list to evolve based on our exchange of ideas and comments as we explore this overall topic together. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you and learning from you and your experiences. Together we can challenge the norm for service delivery and raise the bar in all our customer interactions.

Share your own experiences as a customer. What experience have you had that you consider to be exceptional and why? Which companies are the leaders in outstanding customer service and why?

I’m Barb Lyon and I’m the host of this blog. You can read more about me next to my picture in the sidebar. This blog will be about various aspects of customer service, will focus especially on practical tips and tools, and will include posts from guest writers. You can learn more about this blog by clicking on the About link just under the header.

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