Creating exceptional customer service: quantitative and qualitative measures can help gauge the success of customer service efforts

Modern Brewery Age, Nov 11, 2002 by Pat Jones

Maximizing Shareholder Value by providing exceptional customer service is a goal of all successful Wholesale Distributors. While most Wholesale Distributors have incorporated client feedback to some degree into their customer service model, many have not differentiated between importance to the customer and the customer's actual perceptions of their performance. Therefore, the service factors with high ratings are frequently less important than service factors with low ratings. Furthermore, while many distributors have a good idea where their customer service shortfalls are many more have not developed processes that would insure continual refinement of the customer service mechanism.

There are four primary areas of focus for realizing improvements in customer service. Those are:

* Understand customers expectations of service

* Align business strategy to meet these expectations

* Allocate financial resources through investment in people, technology, business process improvement and physical plant/equipment

* Measure performance quantitatively and qualitatively

We the wholesaler sometimes believe that we know" how to provide good service and therefore do not consistently survey our customers, a sure way to lose market share. How we design and develop the survey is equally important For instance, asking extremely general questions typically results in feedback that does not allow us to "drill down within our organization to find the root cause of the shortfall....asking qualitative and not quantitative questions leaves us with the inability to determine the correct quantitative measures to satisfy our customers.

Misalignment of our business strategy to meet expectations typically occurs when we have competing goals. For instance, an operating goal that measures sales performance based on the number of stops which occur in a week may result in too little time spent with the customer developing the relationship and understanding their needs. On the other hand, a distributor may have a separate group responsible for maintaining the relationship and satisfying the customer's expectations making it unnecessary for the salesperson to spend more time in an account Wholesale Distributors must understand the relationship between customer expectations and competing strategic objectives if the customer relationship is to be managed properly.

Allocation of financial resources is paramount to providing excellence in customer service. How many Wholesale Distributors operate "Customer Service Teams" under a separate umbrella within the organization? While we invest in infrastructure, technology, and people, we often fail to focus our attention on consistently providing superior customer service. Many executive and management meetings may be void of customer service discussions for extended periods, While the company has indicated in their corporate strategy that customer service excellence has top billing, the financial commitment in design of the model, design of the organization, service training, and other factors which drive excellence are not given sufficient attention.

Finally, we must have quantitative as well as qualitative measures of service. If we simply ask, "Are you satisfied with the courtesy of our drivers", the answer may be, "No". When we follow that question with "Please Explain", the answer may be, "The driver hurries through my store". In essence, we know as little after the survey question as we knew before with the exception that we know that our customer is not pleased with out level of service.

The model below is intended as a roadmap for design, development, and implementation of a customer service model.

Pat Jones is a principal of GARR Consulting. His e-mail is pjones@garrconsultinggroup.com