Unit 11 p5

Unit 11 P5

I will now explain how customer service can be monitored and evaluated.

Why businesses monitor and evaluate customer service

 Monitoring and evaluating customer service is important, because it helps to improve customer service. Customer service is very important for all businesses and all profits depend on it. It involves customer service for external customers and customer service for internal customers – employees.

 If your employees are not happy with their job, have long working hours, low payment, no rewards for doing a good job, they probably won’t be bothered to provide good customer service for external customers. You will lose your loyal external customers and won’t be able to get new customers, this leads to low sales. This example showed that the main problem in the business was bad customer service to internal customers – employees, and it lead to further problems.

If sales are going down, you have no repeat customers, no new customers, complaints are rising, compliments are falling and you have high number of staff leaving, it shows that your business is experiencing problems and you need to improve your customer service. Monitoring these things helps to understand the problems you have and find solutions to fix them. It’s good to monitor customer service all the time, it’ll help to fix problems quicker and avoid mistakes in a future.

It also helps to understand your customer’s needs and expectations. Your customers may need different things than they needed before, it could happen because of economical fall and growth, trends changing and etc.

Monitoring customer service- getting a feedback from internal (staff) and external (buyers) customers about the customer service they received. Monitoring customer service is used to indicate progresses, check if company’s aims and objectives are being met and to indicate if business is trading successfully or not. If not, this allows making appropriate actions. Monitoring is undertaken more frequently than evaluating.

Evaluating customer service- is checking a level of sales, regular and new customers, level of complaints/compliments and level of staff turnover. Evaluating customer service is used to indicate longer term results and progresses than monitoring customer service. It identifies, why business is successful or not, what changed in business, how business met its aims and objectives. Evaluating is used to check and take the actions that should be taken in business.

Different ways an organization can monitor customer service

·         Complaint letters - this is a letter written by customer to express negative opinion about services or products they received. This letter usually outlines what was particularly bad about product/service.  This shows the weaknesses of a business and problems that business is experiencing.

·         Compliment letters – a letter writer by customer to express positive opinion about products or services they received. This letter shows what customer liked about product or service. This help to understand what strengths your business have in customer service.

·         Formal customer feedback – e.g. questionnaires and comment card – it can also be online surveys or surveys in a shop. It would be cheaper to make online survey, and it’ll probably be more accurate, as customers don’t have to face other people when they’re doing a survey and they can say what they really think.

·         Informal customer feedback – e.g. comments from customers, if customers are happy about your products/services, if they’re leaving you satisfied or not.

·         Mystery shoppers – very good way to check how your staff is providing customer service to real customers, you just need to pretend that you’re a customer as well and check how they treat you. It’s very easy to do it and very accurate as well, as you get clear understanding about the quality of you customer service.

·         Staff feedback – e.g. staff turnover, number of staff leaving or not attending or staff feedback about their job.  E.g. If staff is not attending or being sick very often, they are probably not satisfied with the job they are doing. If they are not satisfied with the job they are doing they won’t be concerned to make bigger sales.

Different issues that might be monitored by manufacturers and retailers

1.       Speed of delivery

2.       Quality of materials

3.       Costs of materials

4.       Quality of manufacturing procedures

5.       Costs of manufacturing procedures

6.       Selling and buying price of product,

7.       Level of sales

8.       Customers feedback

9.       Staff feedback

Issues that might be monitored by service providers

1.       Quality of services

2.       Costs of products used in services

3.       Costs of services

4.       Selling price of services

5.       Level of sales

6.       Customers feedback

7.       Staff feedback

Different ways in which customer service is evaluated

·         Level of sales – exact number of sales done. If sales are low, some actions should be taken to change it. It’s necessary to firstly identify a purpose of low sales.

·         Repeat customers – repeat customers’ means that people like your products or services and they like your customer service. If they feel that they were treated well they are more likely to come back to you next time. If there are no repeat customers it can mean that customer service is bad and you should put more effort into improving it.

·         New customers – new customers show that your customer service is probably good and your business has a good reputation so it attracts more new customers.

·         Level of complaint and compliment letters – level of complaint letter should be lower that compliment letters or at least it should not be rising. If you see that the level of complaint letters is rising you should take appropriate actions – analyse the purpose of those complaint letters. Complaint letters show why your customers are dissatisfied, so analysing them can be very helpful.

·         Staff turnover – staff will do a good job if they’ll like the job they are doing or if they’ll be rewarded for it. If staff is not attending or being sick very often, they are probably not satisfied with the job they are doing. If they are not satisfied with the job they are doing they won’t be concerned to make bigger sales.