Meaningful customer service tracking

By Timothy B. Miller

December 29, 2011

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Most restorers conduct some sort of customer service survey at the end of every job, and we’ve seen lots of them over the years. Some are pretty basic and others are quite complex.

But they all have one thing in common: They are all equally ineffective in providing a meaningful, actionable and trackable method of measuring and improving customer service.

This isn’t to say that such surveys can’t identify a particularly egregious problem. They do this pretty well, but that tends to be all they’re used for. Someone in the office gives them a quick scan and, if they don’t see a significant problem, files them away somewhere.

Some restorers go a step further and compile the responses to come up with a number value for the surveyed items (we have an 8.5 on showing up on time, etc.). In some cases they even use these numbers in their marketing efforts.

But the problem with these approaches is that while they may tell you how well or poorly you are doing in a specific area, they don’t do it in a way that allows you to identify the underlying reasons.

Good or bad, and we are really talking about bad here, unless you know “why” you not only don’t know what corrective actions to take, you have no way of measuring the effectiveness of those you do take.

When the quality of customer service is hard to really understand, managers instead tend to fall back on that good, old reliable measure: Profit. So long as the company is profitable, they think, customer service has to be OK.

The problem with this thinking, according to Frederick Reichheld, author of “The Ultimate Question,” is that there is good profit and bad profit. Simply put, bad profit is any profit that comes at the expense of your relationship with your customers.

Airline baggage fees are a perfect example of bad profit. Those airlines charging for bags are telling you, beyond any doubt, that they’re more concerned with short term profits than with the value of a long-term relationship with you.

Southwest Airlines understands the difference between good profit and bad profit, which is why they don’t charge baggage fees. As a result, people develop a real and powerful relationship with Southwest that turns into customer loyalty, and loyalty pays big dividends. In fact, there are years when Southwest’s profit is more than all the other major airlines combined!

But that brings us back to trying to measure customer service in a meaningful way. It’s been difficult because, until recently, there has been no hard science indicating how to best track it and then take action and measure the results.

That’s why we highly recommend the “The Ultimate Question” for everyone in a restoration company that has any contact with or impact on customer relationships — which means just about everyone!

The book shows you how to properly survey your customers and put that practice into action. This will allow you access to truly meaningful and highly important data about your customer service delivery and give you the immediate means to do something about it.

Tim Miller is the president of Business Development Associates, Inc., a marketing consulting firm that works exclusively in the cleaning and restoration industry. He can be reached at tim@gobda.com or (773)777-9956.