Service Optimisation
Customers typically demand service. Unlike marketing and sales, it’s not the company that seeks to make contact with the customer, but the customer who proactively approaches the company. At the same time, service-related contact is one of the strongest levers in terms of customer retention, thereby offering enormous potential.
Measuring Service Quality
Precisely because service is often the most influential touchpoint between companies and customers, one should regularly test service
quality. Depending on requirements and the situation, Vocatus deploys a variety of methods to accomplish this.
The classic method is an event-driven customer survey, where customers are contacted promptly after visiting a shop or phoning a call
centre and are asked about their satisfaction with the service they’ve received. However, it’s important to let a few days pass
following the service-related contact so that customers can judge whether the answer they’ve been given by the agent has really been
a help or whether the promised information has arrived in the meantime.
Online diaries also provide a subjective and immediate picture of customers’ satisfaction with service. Unlike an event-driven survey,
the customer describes contact with the company over a longer period. It’s thus possible to rate every event, from visiting the shop
to invoicing and calling a hotline, thereby allowing one to deduce targeted recommendations for the respective departments. The
simultaneous use of online diaries by employees additionally offers a comparison between the different perspectives, and enables one
to gain an accurate picture of the background and internal processes. For example, it’s possible to test employees’
sales orientation as well as their attitude to service.
1-1 explorations also help to understand customers’ experiences. Individual ‘experience ECGs’ represent in diagram form customers’
moods at a specific point during the process. Depending on their level of satisfaction, the graph is then positive or negative.
Through these 1-1 explorations the company finds out about the customer perspective of service and processes, thereby often discovering
weaknesses that aren’t always obvious when dealing internally with customers’ issues.
Testing the Quality of Contact with Call Centres
Because a majority of contact with customers occurs on the phone, it’s vital for companies to regularly give their call centres a
health check that examines both inbound and outbound calls.
Covert test calls are especially suitable for this. So-called Mystery Calling allows
experienced testers to rate the behaviour and attitude of call centre staff on the basis of several standardised cases. In addition to
an objective assessment of content, the main advantage of this method is that competitors’ call centres can also be tested, thus
enabling benchmark comparisons.
Quality Assurance in Shops
However, shops are further key customer interfaces whose service quality has to be tested at regular intervals. A survey using covert
professional buyers is also ideal for obtaining a reliable picture of the level of service. So-called mystery shopping tests objective
criteria such as the shop’s exterior design and customer waiting times as well as subjective criteria such as the salesperson’s
friendliness or sales acumen.
In order to guarantee valid and objectivised results, Vocatus has developed special quality assurance measures: an individual rating
procedure and trained professional testers reduce the influence of subjective assessments and offer the opportunity to compare shops
and regions on the basis of objectivised tests. In-house data gathering ensures valid results, and an intelligent analysis provides
targeted recommendations for action – for the entire company, right down to the individual employee.
Inclusion and Motivation of Employees
When measuring service quality, one often recognizes weaknesses in terms of customer contact but is unable to eradicate them. Amongst
other things, this is down to the fact that employees don’t feel they’re being addressed personally, and they fail to see how they
themselves can make a real contribution to any improvement.
A company should therefore convey to its employees that it values them, and motivate them to enhance their personal performance. For
example, an initial step in this direction is to openly communicate the results of mystery analyses and customer surveys. However,
it’s particularly successful if one goes one step further and manages to make employees feel that their own personal performance is
relevant, and at the same time show them how they themselves can improve the service they provide. Experience suggests that this
allows one to achieve noticeable improvements within a short space of time.
Supplementary Methods
In addition, focus groups and workshops give employees the opportunity to jointly develop solutions to optimise specific processes.
This not only gives them the feeling of being valued, but also an awareness of the responsibility they bear to actually implement
the subsequent proposals in their daily work routine.
These in-depth workshops, which are supported with market research, are not only suitable for service staff, but can help to sensitise
and train managers This also allows one to reveal previously hidden contradictions in terms of working practices, inefficiencies in
internal processes, and the causes of problems.
Wherever it is impossible to use professional testers to reliably and objectively check the quality of service and advice for existing
customers rather than new customers, we recommend using so-called ‘Service Scouts’. These are people who are employed to provide
ongoing reports about the quality of service and advice from the perspective of existing customers. This also allows one to test and
optimise processes that above all affect existing customer loyalty.
It can also be highly revealing if, as a counterpoint to examining external service quality, companies also take a closer look at
their internal service quality. This then allows one to root out weaknesses and
inefficiencies in the internal handling of customers’ issues or inter-departmental processes. This helps to implement holistic quality
management throughout the company’s value added chain.