What do customers want? This million-dollar question has launched several business quests—after all, customer service is the key to higher sales. There are two key points to customer service: promptness and price. Excellent service is also about constantly and consistently exceeding expectations. But, such excellence can’t be scaled in a day. It’s an outcome of an ongoing process—understanding what customers want, then bridging the gap between what you offer and what they expect. We know a happy customer is a boon. According to the American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, a survey conducted in 10 countries, consumers felt that, more often than not, businesses weren’t measuring up. Significantly, a whopping 22 per cent of Indian customers—the highest among the countries surveyed—said they were willing to spend more on companies that provided excellent service.
Improving customer service is your best chance to survive during the slow times and expand business when it picks up. “Today’s customers are fence-sitters. They shop around to check who’s offering them product plus service,” says Nishith Bhandarkar, Business Director, Media Nexxt, an ad firm, and consultant with Bare International, a customer research company. Inspired? Read on to learn more about how to stand out from the crowd.

Set service standards and measures

Establish set service standards: With intense competition among service providers, customers are becoming more demanding. They want it all and they want it now. But it’s unrealistic to ask employees to deliver services “right now” every time. So, business heads should establish standards that lay out the time frame and manner in which services are rendered and create a code. Customer service should never be left to assumptions, as everyone may have their own take. Standards should compare to the industry best. The process of setting them up compels one to review and identify gaps in the firm’s present offerings. Rachna Nath, Executive Director, PwC India, says: “Reviewing business support systems which cover all customer touch points helps achieve a level of customer centricity. This is necessary to improve customers’ experiences and revenue.”

Identify measurable yardsticks: Customer service is about keeping clients happy and enticing them back. But happiness is not easily measured. So, besides setting up standards, define measurable yardsticks to monitor service levels. “You could measure the time spent on each customer, the time taken to respond to a customer’s first contact, a client’s repeat visits, number and value of successive orders, efficacy of advertising mailers or telephonic interactions, customer feedback received directly and on social media, to prevent complaints,” suggests Soeb Fatehi, Principal Consultant, Encode, an engineering consultancy. Technology helps measure certain aspects of staff-client interactions. Take CCTV footage for instance. It helps determine the time taken by attendants to close sales. Setting quantifiable goals is the best way to motivate employees, as they can measure these goals. 

Improving customer service is not a quick fix, but a process.

Train staff: Motivated service personnel make the effort to build a personal connect with clients, which helps retain customers. However, this is unlikely to happen if you don’t have a well-trained and compensated cadre. According to Sanjay Choudhary, India Operations Leader, GE Intelligent Platforms: “Training starts by understanding the concept of the internal and external customer chain.” That means being able to service a customer situated miles away as efficiently as the one next door. Choudhary believes that consumer psyche remains the same in different verticals. “Employees must learn how to go beyond defining quality as an attribute of the product and instead define quality as how well they satisfy the customer’s needs,” says Fatehi. They must be able to excite customers to place successive orders. Listening and resolution skills are vital to avoiding poor experiences—a big put-off. Also, for the best outcome, staff should be trained to begin every client interaction with a quick assessment of their mood and level of satisfaction. “When staff see the customer as their real employer, paying their wages, things work out fine. Call it orienting their basic values to a truism—a business exists only as long as the customers exist,” Fatehi adds.

Where you stand

Tune in to customers: “Aggrieved citizens in ancient India could ring a bell hung outside the city walls to call the king’s attention. Today, a popular fast food chain has adopted this ‘bell technology’ too. Satisfied customers ring the bell to express their ‘happiness’,” says Nath. Modern technology can help firms to stay in touch with changing customer preferences, essential to offering better service. Nath suggests using toll-free service lines, website feedback channels, SMS surveys and online monitoring systems comprising tools such as Google Alerts, BackType and TweetBeep, to gather feedback and analyse satisfaction levels. Directly engaging with the target audience on online social platforms also helps, as people tend to chat about recent purchases and experiences. Personal engagement done promptly is a useful means to show that you are listening.

Hire secret shoppers: Bhandarkar suggests hiring secret shoppers, people paid to shop at a store, for the sake of evaluating customer experience and to assess employee abilities such as integrity, etiquette, product knowledge and sales skills. Secret shopping can also show you where you stand vis-à-vis your competitors, in terms of speed and quality of your retail services, compliance with service standards and customer-friendly business practices. 

Listen to your staff: Customers are often comfortable sharing their opinion about products and services with the sales and service personnel. Knowing, understanding and acting upon these pointers can help a firm serve clients’ needs better. So, take out time to listen to your sales and service staff. Apart from having a clearer understanding of customer preferences, they may also see untapped business opportunities as well as obstacles discouraging potential consumers from using your products and services.

Choudhary provides an example: “A customer needed equipment and service but was unable to commercially close the deal. The concerned employee, who was aware of the urgency of the demand, organised extended credit terms with the finance cost being built-in, thus creating a win-win situation for both the customer and the company.”
Fatehi also suggests that sharing information with an aggrieved customer—for example on a review of staff-initiated corrective and preventive action to plug service loopholes—can help re-establish confidence. He says it also helps ascertain whether the issue has been understood and addressed to the customer’s satisfaction.

Incorporate feedback

Improving customer service is never a quick fix. It’s an ongoing process of setting standards, gearing up staff and feedback—and execution is the key. Your actions need to demonstrate that you’ve really plugged the loopholes. “This is done by converting feedback into actionable business intelligence in real-time to improve the firm-customer dynamics.” A leading direct-to-home television service provider analysed complaints and found that its call centre operations had caused significant revenue loss. The firm has since then strengthened its call centre infrastructure, which has reduced call drop-outs and enhanced customer satisfaction levels.

Common mistakes to avoid

Proper analysis of customer feedback isn’t going to happen till you pick the right strategy. Here are some pointers:

Keep at it: Surveys and contact programmes are a good way to find out how your customers feel. Surveys shouldn’t be reduced to an annual remedial exercise, but should be regular making it easy for customers to share viewpoints.

Be specific: Some companies flood mailing list recipients with too much information. Don’t. Use surveys and customer purchasing history results to narrow down what you wish to send to each consumer. They are more likely to act upon information about products and services they have expressed an interest in.  

Personalise contact: We live in an age of interactive voice response or “IVR” systems. Automated systems, however, fail to build a personal connect with consumers, especially in service-oriented industries such as healthcare and finance, where customer problems and requests require detailed explanations. So, facilitate access to live representatives. Including staff bios on your website also helps personalise service.

Facilitate sales: Make it easy for potential consumers to access your products and services. Provide as many methods as possible to purchase a product—stores, websites, e-mails, SMSes and phone orders. Then, work on improving the retail experience across all these channels. 

Tech tips to collate feedback

Setting up enterprise feedback management systems (EFMS) helps manage market surveys and interpret feedback. Some web-based EFMS solutions are ePeoplePulse from Centre for Excellence in Organisation, Nihilent’s Customer Feedback System and an application from CDC Software based on Microsoft Azure’s Cloud computing platform. Integrating EFMS with an organisation’s CRM programme, like those offered by Salesforce, helps collate data better. Setting up web-based feedback systems also helps centralise customer service. Feedback analytics built into such services uses performance indicators and feedback metrics to measure experience from a generated feedback. Installing OnState CallCenter for Skype, a paid service from the VOIP, allows SMBs to create a low-cost contact management solution.