Many people say that the only business worth having is repeat business and referral business. In good times that may not be as important, but when the economy tightens this is how you are going to keep money rolling in.

Repeat business is cheap because you have already won it. Your customer probably likes what you offer.

Word-of-mouth referral is a highly effective form of promotion. It costs nothing and carries a lot of credibility because it is based on personal experience and usually comes from a trusted source, such as a friend or work colleague.

Often in business the thing that wins you repeat and referral business is the quality of your customer service. Certainly you can compete on price. But customer service can be the lever that allows you to sell your product at a premium, or provide you with an opportunity to up-sell to an existing client base.

Moments of Truth

Many, even most, companies talk the language of customer service, but never execute where it counts – in the hundreds or thousands of “moments of truth” when your people are actually engaged with your customers. One of the big problems can be that neither you nor your employees are there to do just one thing above all else, and even if you are heavily focused on customer service there are still a multitude of competing pressures on your business.

And this can be a critical point. Even your best employees may drop the ball on occasion when they are, for example, under pressure to deliver this month’s results.

Excellent customer service is all about delivering what the customer needs time after time after time. You know how you feel if you have an excellent experience when dealing with a company on a one occasion only to receive poor treatment the next time. You feel let down. It is a powerful emotional response.

Customer Satisfaction Measurement

So, how do you know whether your business consistently delivers quality service to your customers?

Firstly, you can ask them. You will get no more direct feedback about your customer’s perception of their interaction with your company than by asking them. You can, for example, arrange phone surveys or provide feedback forms.

However, sometimes customers don’t appreciate market research calls, and frequently can’t be bothered filling in forms unless, for example, they are really angry. Often they might tell you they were satisfied, but this need not mean they will come back again.

Secondly, you can record and analyse (and, of course, resolve) complaints. This is excellent information about the points at which your service has broken down. However, complaints can be a bit “hit-or-miss”. You only hear from customers who take the time to complain. Many will just quietly resent what has happened and take their business elsewhere. Complaints also focus only on what goes wrong.

You probably also would like to know where your strengths lie. This can help you recognise your staff who go out of their way to provide great service.

Thirdly, talk with your people. They interact with your customers, so have excellent first-hand knowledge. However, your people may sometimes have a vested interest in not letting you know what has happened (if, for example, they have not handled a situation well). They will also not always accurately share the customer perspective of the transaction, only their own perspective.

Fourthly, you can engage a mystery customer service. Mystery customers allow you to test your customer service interaction end-to-end, and also allow you to collect unbiased information, assessed in a consistent way. You control the frequency and breadth of the contacts to be measured, and, if you have multiple channels, across all your channels.

Mystery shopping has been successfully used by organisations such as banks, retailers, fitness centres, restaurants, franchise operations and many others to assess the quality of their service since the 1940s, and is now a $US1.5b industry worldwide.

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