Customer service health check

Studies continue to show that: Good customer service plays a decisive role in gaining new customers and retaining them in the long run. Yet customers often evaluate customer service more negatively thancompanies themselves perceive it to be.

Majorel offers its 10 Day Health Check to businesses that wish to independently benchmark their customer service. A team of experts will put your organisation’s customer support under the microscope for a total of ten days. At the end, your company will receive a 360-degree overview of its customer service maturity level, along with suggestions for optimisation. The check consists of three phases: the first stage involves an analysis of your customer service status, followed by benchmarking, and lastly a draft of recommendations for action.

To measure the current status of your customer service, the team of consultants will consider six dimensions of customer support and will determine the strengths and weaknesses of each dimension via a standardised questionnaire:

1. The organisation:  How are the structures and processes organised in your customer service, for example?
2. Customer expectations: Which communication channels would your customers like to see and which do you offer to them?
3. Operations: How are control and quality management processes used in day-to-day business?
4. Personnel activities: How are employees recruited and trained, for example?
5. Technology: How integrated are the various systems, for example? And which data are available?
6. Performance: How are strategic and operational figures generated, evaluated and analysed?

The team uses different methodology to answer those questions. These include interviews with various experts within the organisation and agent shadowing sessions which involve shadowing customer service agents in their daily activities, with a view to analysing front- and back-end processes.

The actual analysis of your customer service is followed by a benchmarking analysis. This analysis takes a cross-industry model to determine your customer support’s maturity level. Do you have telephone support only with limited options for service, a modern customer service centre with some customer-oriented activities, a target-group oriented centre that processes complex issues, or a state-of-the-art centre offering fully-fledged, integrated communication across all the relevant channels?

Using pre-defined criteria and the analysis of the six dimensions, your customer support is compared with the ‘Virtual Star’ – a theoretical construct that combines the strengths of numerous analysed companies – and the specific industry benchmark. The third phase draws on the weaknesses identified during the process.

The third phase of the 10 Day Health Check reveals options for achieving a higher maturity level for your customer support. To that end, the team at Majorel develops custom optimisation suggestions based on the findings of the benchmark analysis and evaluates these in terms of your value proposition in relation to the implementation period.  As part of the process, the operative added value of each measure – cost savings, sales promotion, or improved customer experience – are specifically calculated. In the case of quick wins, i.e. measures that can be delivered quickly, extra suggestions are presented for immediate implementation such as the optimisation of control functions or the introduction of a holistic quality management system.

More about this: Majorel Consulting services

Author: Editorial team Future. Customer.
Image: © Witthaya – AdobeStock