Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions
Is It Possible To Measure or Assess Excellent Customer Service?
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Excellent customer service (or its opposite, poor customer service) is so important to companies in today's competitive world that it's important to know whether you are achieving the customer service levels you require to be competitive. Many things in today's companies are hard, or impossible to measure. However, you CAN measure customer service in quantitative ways, and you can also assess customer service by looking at the perceptions of your customers.
Both are important.
Customer service metrics (the word metrics is foreign to some people), refers to the ways you measure whether you are providing excellent customer service. For example, some sample customer service metrics:
- number of calls handled in an hour
- number of customer complaints
- percentage of customer complaints resolved to customer's satisfaction within one "contact"
- percentage of customers who are return customers
These kinds of metrics are fairly direct measures, because they measure customer behavior which reflects whether you are providing what your customers want from you.
There are other metrics that are less direct. For example:
- number of items that are incorrectly priced or have prices missing
- average length of time waiting at check-out counter
- average time on phone "on hold"
These are less direct because they do not have to do with customer behavior per se. These measures are assumed (and probably are) related to customer satisfaction.
Finally, there are metrics (and less quantitative information) that more directly reflect the stated opinions and perceptions of customers. This information is usually gathered by directly asking customers how satisfied they are with customer service, through surveys, phone calls, or during normal interactions with customers.
See Also: What Common Mistakes Are Made When Choosing Customer Service Metrics?
Robert Bacal is the author of two books on customer service: Perfect Phrases for Customer Service: Hundreds of Tools, Techniques, and Scripts for Handling Any Situation, and Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook. Most of the questions and answers in the Customer Service Knowledgebase (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.