Are We Completely Prepared To Measure Service Event Satisfaction? (article 3 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?

How Can We Enhance Our Customer Issue Escalation Process?

As we discussed last week, data preparation is vital to the success of any satisfaction measurement program. The feedback you get must be statistically valid and accurate to be truly useful. What’s more, you may end up sacrificing your program’s success if your approach to measuring satisfaction is bothersome to customers.

Furthermore, don’t overlook the advantages that lie in identifying unsatisfied customers during the follow up interview process. Spearheading customer issues well will increase overall customer satisfaction.

Remember, a good satisfaction measurement program calls for customer follow up within hours or days of the service event. Prompt follow up gives you an excellent chance to fend off potentially damaging customer situations that might have remained undiscovered without a satisfaction measurement program in place. Even better, with a properly designed escalation process, you can turn those undetected problems to your advantage and increase customer satisfaction.

To begin with, your service performance measurement efforts need to include parameters you can use to identify unsatisfied customers and customers with unresolved problems. For example, if your interviewer comes upon a customer with an outstanding issue and an issue that has become worse, a red escalation flag should go up immediately. A red flag should also be raised if a customer provides consistently low satisfaction scores during the interview.

Highly-skilled interviewers know when a customer isn’t happy. They know how to let the customer vent, at the same time, they immediately alert the service provider to re-open and escalate the customer issue.

Next, you need to implement an issue escalation process to receive and act upon potentially damaging customer situations. Whether you follow up with customers within hours or days of the service experience, it’s critical that each service manager on duty knows to check for these alerts regularly.

Many customers are actually more satisfied knowing that the service provider has the wherewithal to identify unresolved issues and dowse them quickly. It gives the customer an extra sense of security knowing that your company cares enough to follow up on service performed and ensure that they are completely satisfied.

Finally, tracking and analyzing unhappy customer alerts can be another tool in your arsenal to determine areas of weakness with the service organization.

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.