Small and medium businesses (SMBs) often don’t have consistent processes to measure their customer service levels, which means they’re missing out on a lot of valuable insights. With 2016 drawing to a close, now is a good time for SMBs to think about how they can bring in effective ways to gauge customer satisfaction for the new year.
Measuring customer service ad hoc isn’t going to provide SMBs with an accurate picture of how they’re doing when it comes to serving customers and bolstering their satisfaction levels. Over at Dynamic Business, Customer Service Institute of Australia CEO Anouche Newman has a few suggestions on how SMBs can get started in the consistent measurement of customer service outputs and customer satisfaction:
Although measurement techniques vary from industry to industry, a useful starting point is to make a deliberate effort to understand the factors that drive customer satisfaction in the sector in which you operate. For example, what aspects of customer service delivery does your customer value? What do they see as baseline satisfaction drivers and what will wow them?
Case in point – there’s no point in reducing wait time on a call if certain customers, usually older people, are happy to wait. Instead, focus on ensuring that when they do reach your customer service representative, the problem can be resolved as quickly as possible. In short, businesses need to ensure that they are investing in the right places and have measurement techniques that are based on regular customer insights.
You can get more tips on how SMBs can improve their businesses for the new year over at Dynamic Business.
Comments
One response to “How SMBs Can Start Consistently Measuring Their Customer Service Levels”
One of the reasons that SMBs have a problem here is hinted at in the name: ‘Small’. A lot just don’t have the resources in the form of warm bodies to sit down and examine the metrics of customer feedback, satisfaction, etc.
At the ‘small’ end, SMBs generally don’t have the time or other resources to dissect this sort of data with meetings, PowerPoint slides, etc. They’re too busy trying to make a living.
However, what they do have is far fewer layers of management between the customer and the executive level, hopefully removing (most of) the insulating layers that exist in big business.