Are We Completely Prepared To Measure Service Event Satisfaction? (article 2 of 3)
by Service 800, Inc.

The three-week series of articles focuses on:

• How To Ensure Customer Feedback is Statistically Valid and Accurate
  
• What is a Skip List and Why is it Necessary?
  
• How Can We Enhance Our Customer Issue Escalation Process?

What is a Skip List and Why is it Necessary?

When you plan your satisfaction measurement project, the information you gather as well as the accuracy of the information are equally important. We covered some of those issues in last week’s article. Another factor to take into account is burden the project may place on your customer base. One of the biggest objections to measuring satisfaction is the fear of bothering customers to the point they go from satisfied to dissatisfied – not what you want.

In some cases, one technical person on the customer side is responsible for reporting questions and issues for many users. What’s more, that person might call into a help line several times over a period of a few weeks. In these cases, you don’t want to interview that individual to the point of irritation. Hence, the “skip list.”

Most support professionals know that it’s important to follow up with customers within a short time after the service event. For this reason, you could conceivably contact many of your customers several times within a short time frame. To gather the satisfaction information you need, without leaving the customer feeling pestered or with a sense that you’re paranoid about your service capabilities, it’s imperative to implement guidelines that determine how many times to contact the same customer within a given time period.

A skip list lets you build parameters around how often you follow-up with a company or individual. Some customers appear more than once on the contact list because they experience multiple service events in a short period. Others might appear multiple times on the list for the same issue. If that’s the case, you should skip the duplicate customer records before interviewing customers to minimize the annoyance factor.

Regardless of why a customer appears on the contact list more than once, it’s a good rule of thumb to limit your post-service customer contact to once every 30-90 days – depending, of course, on your specific business and customer expectations.

Finally, always listen to customer feedback to determine if you’ve selected the correct time span between follow-ups with the same customer. Change the filters if customers begin to complain about too many contact attempts.

Next week - How Can We Enhance Our Customer Issue Escalation Process?

To Contact Us — To discuss this topic, any other Benchmark Benefits article, or to provide topic suggestions, please contact Jan DeMatteo at jan@service800.com.

For More Information — For additional information about the SSPA SoftwareMetric Customer Satisfaction Benchmark, SERVICE 800, or other benchmark programs, visit www.service800.com/benchmarkprograms.asp.

About SERVICE 800
Founded in 1989, SERVICE 800 designs and administrators real-time customer satisfaction measurement programs, helping service organizations follow up with their customers within hours or days of service events. The company utilizes a distinctive follow up telephone interview process along with e-mail, web, and other survey techniques to measure customer satisfaction. With offices in Minneapolis and London, SERVICE 800 has been measuring customer satisfaction for corporations throughout the world for over a decade.