What are the best tools you can use to measure the quality of your service?
There are many tools available for you to gain a better understanding of the service your company provides that will also help you improve customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is essential to grow your business and so is ensuring that your service quality is the best. Many companies don’t realize that these two methods have a strong and positive correlation between them and when your service quality suffers, your customer satisfaction does as well.
This is one reason measuring service quality is so great. If this is the case, though, then why is measuring service quality so difficult or many companies? Well, if you follow these tools to measure service quality, you will not only better understand how to measure quality more effectively and accurately, but you’ll also learn causes of service quality problems.
SERVQUAL
This multi-dimensional research tool is designed to capture customer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions that represent best service quality practices. With SERVQUAL, you conduct a survey that asks your customers to rate the service they receive compared to their expectations. The five elements of this tool include reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness.
Post Service Ratings
Much like SERVQUAL, asking customers to rate their service experience is an effective and easy way to understand how satisfied customers are with the service you provided. Once a customer has received service, you can easily send them an email asking them to rate their experience or even conduct this through your website or mobile app. Many customers are willing to fill this out because it is easy and takes almost no time at all.
Mystery Shoppers
One very popular technique used by retail stores, hotels, and restaurants is to employ mystery shoppers to judge the service quality their employees are offering. Mystery shoppers work by coming into your establishments and pretending to be a customer and assessing the service based on criteria you find essential to provide the best service. Mystery shoppers offer more insights than simply observing how your employees work. This is because employees will most likely be on their best behavior around their boss and it is easier to effectively judge the true service your employees offer when the judge is undenounced to them.
Social Media Monitoring
Thanks to the rise of social media, this method has become very popular for businesses. Many people use social media as an outlet where they can unleash their frustration and be heard. This makes it the perfect place for your company to hear the unfiltered opinions of customers if the right tools are implemented for them to do so. By implementing tools like Mention and Google Alerts, you will be able to easily monitor what customers say about the service you provide. With social media, you can even ask your followers for feedback on your service quality which will help you make substantial improvements.
Follow-Up Surveys
This method allows you to ask your customers to rate your service quality through an email survey or even an in-app survey. Compared to post-customer ratings, follow-up surveys give your customers the time and space to create more detailed responses. Follow-up surveys also provide a more holistic overview of your service because instead of a case-by-case assessment, these surveys measure your customer’s overall opinion of your service quality.
When it comes to gaining customer feedback about your service quality, it is important to note that customers are more likely to rate and provide feedback when they’ve received bad service as opposed to good service. Try incentivizing your customers with a chance to win something or providing them with a coupon for their next purchase. This will help you better understand how customers feel about the service your company provides
