5 Ways to Test Your Customer Service Level
Posted by: Mark Gwilliam Posted on: March 18, 2008
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Your customer service level is a significant measure of how well (or how bad) you serve your customers. Thus, it is a crucial determinant of how well your business will do - particularly how good you are at retaining customers and generating repeat business. Indirectly, it also contributes to your referral business - how well you serve existing customers will influence their inclination to refer you to their friends, family and acquaintances. The following are five ways by which you can test your customer service level. This list is not exhaustive, but this should give you a fair idea of how good you are at serving your customers. Can you readily fill orders through your inventory? If you have great customer service level, then you should easily be able to fill your customer orders. You should keep careful note of what your customers order and whether you have the item they are requesting at the time you receive the order. If you are almost always “out of stock,” then you are failing to serve your customers the best way possible. In a business with diverse number of products, if you are able to fill the order for approximately 95% of the time then you are doing fine. If you are a business that offers only one product, 100% fulfilment of normal orders (barring abnormally large orders) should be your goal. Can you deliver your customers’ orders in time? Another factor that you should measure to test your customer service level is the efficiency of your service or how fast you are able to deliver the product or service which has been ordered. If you are almost always missing your target delivery dates, then your customer service delivery chain needs major work. You should compute the proportion of customer orders that have been delivered on time to the total number of customer orders. This calculation should be time-bounded. For instance, for a month’s total number of orders, what percentage has been delivered on time? If you register that 95% of the time, your customers receive their order at the designated delivery date, then your business is doing fine. Can you successfully resolve your customers concerns? For great customer service, you need to respond to your customers’ inquiries and resolve their concerns. A simple way of testing this would be to measure the proportion of the number of customer inquiries that have been effectively resolved to the total number of customer inquiries received. Do you respond quickly to your customers’ mails/emails and phone calls? How fast you respond to customers is another means of measuring your customer service level. If you are able to respond to your customers within 24 hours (less is even better) of receiving their call, correspondence or email, then you are doing great. Do you pass according to your customers? Finally, your customers themselves can tell you whether you pass or fail when it comes to fulfilling their needs. You can actually conduct a customer survey. The survey should focus on customer service issues so you can measure how well you are able to serve your customers from these customers’ point of view.
About the Author
Mark Gwilliam, FCCA, uses his international experience to coach small business owners on how to run successful businesses and how to attract and retain profitable customers. He combines his natural enthusiasm for sharing his knowledge with his proven ability to provide practical down-to-earth solutions for his clients. He has written several books and owns several companies which offer small business owners integrated business solutions. He wr
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