Customer Servces
How To Determine Your Customer Service Indexby Dr. Jeff Magee
The labels are many, the experts abound and when all is said and done, another business gets into trouble and many times ceases to exist. How you measure the level of "Customer Service" (even if you don't perceive yourself as a service provider, you are!) extended to others (internally and externally), really does say a lot about whom you are and how long you will "survive or thrive", as a colleague of mine Carl Potter would say.
Here is a fast yet extremely powerful way to gauge the level of customer care being received by others – keeping in mind that how you score does reflect how much business you will experience and how long you will survive.
Two factors to measure are the "offering" you extend (we will label that "Product" on a vertical axis line) and the delivery vehicle of that "offering", you (we will label that "Service or People" on an horizontal axis line).
Here is how it works, visualize an "L-grid" or draw one on a piece of paper. You can measure yourself, others, business units, etc. against this grid. One the vertical axis, label the bottom with "poor" and the top with "excellent". Half way up the axis line, number it with a number "five" as this is the breakpoint between unacceptable and acceptable. Do the same for the horizontal line.
Now measure "what you deliver" on the vertical axis and "how it is delivered" on the horizontal axis. If a person in receipt of your "offering" is upset use this grid and again you will be able to immediately determine where the problem is and where corrective action must take place.
Here are the answers, as to where you land within the grid and what it really means:
Top Left Quadrant would be labeled as "excellent" customer care by most organizations and it would be very misleading, as this is truly "brand loyalty". When a competitor comes into your market, your customers will leave, as top left quadrant also means that the "delivery vehicle" carries the organization and the people component are poor;
Bottom Left Quadrant is easy to determine, neither the product or people are acceptable and thus this quadrant of space attainment would be labeled "poor";
Bottom Right Quadrant would be labeled as "excellent" and this too is very misleading. Here the "product" is at best acceptable, but what really is happening here is that the people component is carrying the organization, or people loyalty;
Top Right Quadrant is the ultimate goal as this would be labeled as "exceptional" (by definition no word exceeds 'exceptional') service, as both the "offering" (product) and the "delivery vehicle" (people) have exceeded customer expectations – this is building customer relationships for life!
The biggest determent to sustained business success is avoiding arm chair consultants and academic authors who profess how to be "excellent!"
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Dr. Jeff Magee, Ph.D., CMC, CSP, PDM, has published over 200 articles and presents over 100 training seminars a year. For more information, visit www.jeffreymagee.com, or Contact Robert Hannesson @1.877.90.MAGEE
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