I hear them all the time – “What is the true value of customer service”? Or, “How do I know my customer service training works”? Customer service is a funny thing, it’s very hard, if not impossible to draw a straight correlation between service levels and bottom line revenue. Asking the direct effect is kind of like asking “What is Santa Claus’ value is to Christmas”? We know he does elevate the holiday, but how would you affix a dollar amount to that? However, we can measure the satellite effects of great customer service.
In business, we spend countless amounts of money trying to improve and some things can be measured directly – a new laptop computer that runs 20% faster and has 300% more memory is fairly easy to measure the impact it will have on our productivity. Technical items seem to be easier to measure by nature, but what about those non-technical advances – customer service for example. There are ways to measure and evaluate our service levels. One of the oldest and most common, asking the customer. We are at the mercy of their memory and emotional state at the time, but it does provide some feedback. What I have found to work even better is using a mystery shopper! These are trained individuals that make a science out of measuring sales and service levels. They account for their experience on a pre-determined scale of elements. For example, did the sales rep use my name? Did they ask for the sale? Did they offer complimentary items along with my purchase? These are specific service elements that we can measure against.
The Temkin Group, once was an operation within Forrester Reasearch and came to this conclusion as it relates to the value of customer experience – “At an aggregate level, my research at Forrester Research showed that improvements in customer experience are highly correlated to higher loyalty in consumer markets. In a report called “Customer Experience Leaders Garner More loyalty,” for instance, we found that customer experience leaders have more loyal customers than customer experience laggards. The loyalty gap with consumers was 15% to 17% in three areas: willingness to buy more products, reluctance to switch, and likelihood to recommend”.
Those are huge correlations, a loyalty gap of over 15% for customer experience leaders! No, I don’t know how much Santa or the Easter Bunny are worth, but I gaurantee they make those holidays richer for all of us!
Enjoyed the read! Thanks
I know this is focused on the impact of how a service representative interacts with the you, me, others as a customer, but something I always try to do as a customer is to use their name when interacting with the service provider. All I do is glance at their name tag and address them using their name. For example, “Thank you Joe, I appreciate our help”. I find that the service provider becomes even more engaged in providing me service. If you have not done this before, give it a try. Different angle of looking at the customer service interaction.
I agree with Jeff’s comment as well. I also make sure that when I am speaking to someone on the phone, I write their name so I don’t forget it and I address them throughout the conversation. It seems the service rep perks up when they hear their name. I think it lends to a more personal, friendly conversation. Enjoyed reading this article.