The fact that customer service is essential in business is not exactly front-page news in the modern world. It's just something that businesses have to offer to be successful, right? However, what isn't as widely understood as it should be is the necessity to track customer satisfaction levels.
Why Are Customer Service Metrics Important?
Metrics like these are vital to your operation, regardless of whether you're in hospitality, retail or any industry that has vendor/consumer interactions. The fact is that 80% of Australian consumers tell more of their friends and family about a negative experience than a positive one - so you need to have a handle on how well you're doing. The question is, how do you measure it?
How Is Customer Service Measured And Monitored?
So, how can you track how well your interpersonal skills are being received by your customers? The good news is that there are a number of methods you can use.
1. Customer Surveys
Perhaps the best way you can track what your customers think is through direct surveys. As you'll often learn in customer support training courses , these can be obtained via smartphone apps, in-store surveys (if you're interacting personally with customers), SMS surveys and more.
Companies like Qualtrix offer online services that allow you to automatically track what customers think about you long-term, so it doesn't necessarily mean lots of extra work on the part of the business owner.
2. CSAT Scores (Short-Term Feedback)
Next, we have the Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT for short. This is a quick customer feedback service that allows businesses to capture short-term feedback i.e. how people feel directly after making a purchase. Delivered by SMS and email, customers are able to respond by choosing one to say they were Highly Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied or Highly Unsatisfied.
Intelligent software from Australian companies like SimpleSat then takes all the feedback received from all the customers and aggregates it to offer an average score. The higher the score, the higher the average satisfaction of your customers.
3. Social Media Customer Feedback
Thanks to the advent of social media platforms over the last 20 years or so, there now exists another way to see what your customers think of what you offer. By establishing a presence on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you get a two-way dialogue with existing and prospective customers.
Reddit, Quora and Yelp are other online locations where customers go to praise or complain about your business, so it's a great places to check. Again, the process of monitoring this data doesn't have to be labour-intensive, as software like Media Mentions can do it for you automatically.
This can be a rich source of customer feedback, with positive, negative and neutral sentiments expressed across the various platforms and can help to determine what you're doing right as a company and what you're not.
Improve Your Customer Feedback With Short Courses Online
Offering excellent customer service is essential for any business, but even more so in the hospitality sector. So, if you are in need of improvement in this area, don't despair, as it's possible to work on things in your own time thanks to our CPD Endorsed, video-based customer service skills short course training.
Our Advanced Customer Skills course is like every course in our vast library (that covers more than 20 industries) in that it comes with 1-to-1 mentoring and offers an immersive learning experience. How immersive? Just take a look at our Student Study Demo, which shows you everything you need to know about why our students see ours as the best online courses around.
Alternatively, if you'd like to know more about us and the flexible payment plans we've put into place to make our learning even more accessible to ambitious professionals, come and visit us today at www.onlinecoursesaustralia.edu.au, where you'll also find many more useful blogs like this one.
If, however, you have any questions you'd like us to answer or just after some guidance on the right course to take for your needs, call us on 1300 611 404 or email us at [email protected], and we'll respond as quickly as we can.
