When you were a one person show, you had a lot of control over your business. Each transaction could be followed up with a smile or a phone call to ensure that the product arrived safely or the service received was helpful. You took pride in your business and that showed in the way you treated your customers.
But as your business grows, you’ll end up hiring employees. Although you want to hire great employees who have your business’ best interests at heart, the reality is they won’t always give the level of service you’d expect.
This is the case all over the world and companies spend millions of dollars on customer service training to help their employees handle customers so that the customer leaves happy.
Whether your business is in the hiring and expanding phase or not, you should start planning your customer service strategy for when you get there. Don’t wait for it to happen on its own; be proactive! Here are some ways that you can monitor your business’ customer service:
- Hiring a third party to call your customers is a popular option. Often, these third party customer service surveyors ask a brief series of questions and rank the service received on a scale of 1 to 5. While this is a good, widely used strategy, it only measures customer perception of the people who actually answer their phone, and it measures this (usually) too long after the transaction has taken place. A better (and more affordable) option would be for you to take an afternoon and call a handful of people who had done business with your company that week.
- Asking customers to fill in anonymous survey cards and drop them off or mail them in can be a useful option. It was popular but has decreased in popularity recently. A similar option would be to have an online survey. Because of their anonymity, they are easily falsified by employees who want a great customer service score. Also, because they require some work on the part of the customer, it’s usually only the most irate customers who actually take the time to fill out those questionnaires and send them in. One option is to have them spend one minute to fill it out in the store and drop it into a box before they leave, and don’t make it anonymous.
- Mystery shoppers remain one of the very best ways to measure customer service. Since most other measuring tools are reactive (that is, after the transaction) they are sometimes swayed by a person’s reluctance to part with their own money, and that could result in a negative score. Mystery shoppers, though, measure the actual service provided. There are mystery shopper services out there that will send in people to measure the service for you or you can have family and friends check them out. Be sure to give each one a simple checklist of things to watch for rather than to ask them for a general “feeling” of service.
Measuring service will always be fraught with difficulty because of how subjective it is. Regular contact with your customers, even if you are no longer on the front lines, employing mystery shoppers, and conducting in-store questionnaires is the best combination to ensure high quality customer service from your employees.
