Developing Effective Customer Service Strategies

Developing a Customer Service Questionnaire

Carefully read through each question.  In your response, you should use terms and phrases that you defined in your previous assessment.  Reflect on your learning unit, including video links, links to other resources, and your own research.  

Please note: Where the response does sufficiently demonstrate your knowledge in this assessment, your submission will be returned to you for resubmission.

Identify and fully explain the term Customer Service Strategies.  Provide examples of how these strategies can be implemented within any organisation.  

Customer service an effective customer care strategy is essential to the growth of your business. … A customer care strategy plays an important role in building customer satisfaction, helping you to retain loyal customers and increase levels of repeat business.

A customer service strategy consists of:

A Vision for Customer Service

Communicating the customer service vision is an important first step in service strategy. Employees need to understand their role in meeting the needs of customers and how their work contributes to the vision. It is easy to recognize businesses that are strong in service and those that aren’t. Service training is the key to a great customer service experience.

Assessing Customer Needs

It is important to find out what the customer needs and expects. There are several approaches to soliciting customer feedback. It can be done by using customer comment cards, satisfaction surveys or focus groups. Each method can be used to acquire feedback that can then be used to develop a plan that strives to exceed customer expectations.

Customer expectations change at a rapid pace and many organizations fall short when they THINK they know what the customer wants without asking them. Unfortunately, some businesses waste a lot of time and money developing products and services that don’t meet customer expectations. Successful organizations have learned to find out what the customer wants and to develop products and services that meet those expectations. It is also important to remember that customer expectations are a moving target and what a customer wants today could be very different tomorrow.

Successful organizations have figured out how to hire service-oriented employees. This is done by screening potential candidates that have a natural tendency for service. Technical skills can be taught but personality and attitude cannot. Therefore, not every employee should be interacting with customers.

Organizational Goals for Customer Service

Customer satisfaction should be measured against identified customer needs. There should be measurable customer satisfaction goals, and employees should be aware of those goals so they can help the organization achieve its service objective.

Customer Service Issues and Improvements

Customer Service Training

Every business should develop customized employee training that expresses the organization’s approach to service. This should be practical teaching that demonstrates how the employee is expected to respond in all service interactions. This would include how to answer the telephone, respond to complaints, fulfil a customer need or provide a basic service recovery. Much of this can be spelled out with defined customer service standards that dictate basic employee behaviour.

Employees should be held accountable for the organization’s customer satisfaction goals. Achieving these goals should be a cultural norm that is incorporated into the performance management process. It is imperative that all employees understand the part they play and the responsibility they have for helping to achieve the organization’s overall customer satisfaction goals.

Strong service behaviours are reinforced through a defined reward and recognition system. This ensures that employees receive positive feedback when they exhibit the desired customer service behaviours.

Any successful organization understands the importance of a strong service culture. This is accomplished by creating systems and processes that help to identify who the customers are and what the customers want, and developing strategies to achieve those expectations.

Explain different strategies that can be applied for securing customer feedback.  In your response, you should identify and describe the value of implementing, analysing, and responding to customer feedback for all stakeholders.  

The different strategies that can be used for the collection of customer feedback can be enlisted as follows:

Customer feedback services: The use of tools such as Qualaroo helps in acquiring feedback from customers that helps in understanding about the quality of product and the level of customer satisfaction level

Customer contact forms and Email: It helps in acquiring spontaneous feedbacks from the customer and estimating customer expectations

Conducting usability tests: Usability tests help in acquiring feedback about website and web-related products

Customer interviews: In-depth customer interviews helps in understanding what are the new features that the customers would like to be incorporated within the product

Social media: Polling survey helps in estimating the popularity of a target product

Comment forums: Comment boxes at the end of pages help in gaining candid feedbacks from consumers about the quality of the product

On-site activity: Analytics help in understanding how the consumers are associating themselves with the use of products

Feedback collected through websites: Helps in evaluating consumer responses at frequent intervals

On the basis of the product characteristics, the appropriate feedback strategy should be implemented. Further, the collected response must be analysed so as to render continuous quality improvement of the products and to ensure that the product can be evaluated critically as per the customer responses and steps can be taken to improvise the quality. This would ensure better customer experience (secondary stakeholder) and also improve the business output of the concerned organization (primary stakeholder)

Understanding Customer Service Strategies

Identify at least three situations where competitive intelligence can assist in developing services within an organisation.  Undertake your own research, and reflect on different processes/practices that could be applied to gain competitive intelligence.  

Competitive intelligence guides the decision makers to take important decisions that help in the planning and implementation of a suitable business strategy that yields improved returns. The best attributes of competitive intelligence can be considered as the ability to undertake smarter decisions, gain an advantage, avoid the misfortune of conducting expensive mistakes, avoid nasty surprises, predict the moves of the rival organizations and predict the changes within an organization. In addition to this, clearly identifying consumer needs, improving the organization internally and discovering the best solution to expand business operations can also help in avoiding missed opportunities of poor decision making. Therefore the three situations where competitive intelligence can be used to develop services within an organization would include conducting a market analysis, improving quality and fixing standardised market price. 

Perform some online research into customer service standards, and use this as inspiration to design and present a comprehensive checklist for an employee to follow.  This is to ensure that they continually provide effective customer services within their role.  At least ten points should be included.

The comprehensive checklist for the employees can be mentioned as follows:

Possess excellent product knowledge

Involve in customer interaction

Possess problem-solving ability

Must be able to treat customers professionally

Should be able to handle customer queries with convenience

Should ask for valuable customer feedback

Must be keen to learn new skills

Must be able to handle customer frustration

Must exhibit effective communication and must listen intently

Identify and explain the purpose for a business to regularly evaluate their customer services strategies.  Identify both the advantages and disadvantages for undertaking this.  What are the risks to an organisation if this process is not in place?

The advantages of acquiring customer feedback can be enlisted as follows:

Learning customer demands

Identifying customer inconvenience and problems

Upgrading service quality to acquire customer loyalty

Restructuring the specification of the products to meet customer demands

The major disadvantages of the product can be enlisted as follows:

Asymmetrical representation of customer demands

Poor reputation

Wastages of resources and time

What are the five key outcome attributes required by most customers?  Explain each one.

Product knowledge: Service centre agents while interacting with a consumer must possess an impeccable product knowledge in order to assure the customers that they have made the right choice by investing in the product that has such remarkable features. A customer care agent with poor product knowledge only frustrates the customer and makes him feel that he made a wrong choice by investing in the product

Different Strategies for Securing Customer Feedback

Patience and flexibility: It is obvious that the customers encountering problems with the product would be extremely frustrated and dealing with such consumers would require patience as well as flexibility to ensure that they are comfortable to voice their queries

Customer attention: The primary focus should be on the customers to ensure them that the problem on their end would be resolved as soon as possible to relieve them from stress

Language skills: The agents interacting with the consumers must be fluent with their language skills in order to make the communication process smooth

Empathy towards customer: The agents must as well showcase empathy to make the consumers believe that the inconvenience caused to the customer is deeply regretted and would be resolved as soon as possible

When a problem or situation has been identified, what are four key steps that can be applied to resolve or rectify the situation?  Explain each step.

The four steps can be enumerated as[ Ordenes, Francisco Villarroel, Babis Theodoulidis, Jamie Burton, Thorsten Gruber, and Mohamed Zaki. “Analyzing customer experience feedback using text mining: A linguistics-based approach.” Journal of Service Research 17, no. 3 (2014): 278-295.]:

Proactively listening to the consumer complaint: In this step the executive would ask the consumer to be vocal about his problem and express his concern

Apologize for the inconvenience that has been caused: In this step, the executive would politely apologize and make the consumer feel that he would like to help the consumer and solve his problem

Offer a solution and execute the solution: In this step, the executive would offer solutions to the problem and execute the offered solution

Follow up with the customer and ask for their valuable feedback: This is the last step where the executive would follow up with the customer and ask for a valuable feedback.

What are three different types of budgets used in organisations to look at customer service objectives?  Explain each type.  

Top Down Budgeting: This budgeting method is planned by the highest level of authorities within an organization who clearly draft a business budget aligned with the expense estimates and profit that could be acquired from the implementation of the business plan

Zero-based Budgeting: This form of budgeting enumerates justifying the allotted budget for a particular planned expense. This helps in avoiding eliminating unnecessary expenditures and at the same time also helps in identifying critical business needs

Incremental Budgeting: This form of budgeting characteristically helps in adding a certain proportion of increment to the new budget. It helps in reducing employee conflicts and is convenient to understand. Also, the budget preparation costs are low. On the other hand, it does not have any provision for introducing an incentive scheme for the employees to boost productivity.

When looking at customer satisfaction, what are five of the critical areas for consideration within the organisation’s plan?

The five critical areas that can help in regulating customer satisfaction can be mentioned as under[ Olsson, Helena Holmström, and Jan Bosch. “Towards continuous customer validation: a conceptual model for combining qualitative customer feedback with quantitative customer observation.” In International Conference of Software Business, pp. 154-166. Springer, Cham, 2015.

The organization must ensure that the employee workforce is extremely alert and responsive to meet the employee needs

Reliability: The organization must ensure that the employees within the organization are reliable and can handle customers with patience

Speed: The organization plan must comprise of imparting suitable training to the customers to ensure that the employees can solve customer queries with convenience

Value: The organization must impart values to the employees so as to communicate to the customers that they are valued and that would ensure them going back to the organization[ Celuch K, Robinson NM, Walsh AM. A framework for encouraging retail customer feedback. Journal of Services Marketing. 2015 Jul 13;29(4):280-92.]

Competence: The team of professionals must be competent to demonstrate excellent problem solving skills so as to acquire customer trust