How Often Should You Schedule Customer Service Meetings and Reports?
October 26, 2012
How satisfied are your customers with your product? Customer service monitoring and reporting serves as a finger on the pulse.
In a previous post, customer service expert and OpenView Senior Advisor Bill Price, Founder of Driva Solutions, explained how important it is to identify the customer service metrics that matter most. But just how often should your customer service team be gathering, reviewing, and relaying that data to ensure they’re ideally positioned to deliver the most value through customer satisfaction and support?
In today’s marketplace, companies can’t afford not to be customer-centric. Price helped develop many of the principles that now dominate customer support during his time as Amazon’s first Vice President of Global Customer Service, and he’s been working with companies to help them establish and improve their customer service operations ever since. In this video series (recorded previously with OpenView), he walks you through the real-time, daily, weekly, and monthly customer service meetings and reporting practices that can empower your company to better serve its customer base.
Daily Customer Service Reporting
Daily customer service reporting at a company should come in two flavors: real-time and end-of-day. Both types of data should be reviewed on a daily basis, says Price. Real-time reports are more time-sensitive, but the end-of-day data can be equally significant. They each provide a unique picture individually, but when combined, they should provide a comprehensive snapshot of your support center’s well-being. In this short video, Price says that companies should regularly review their customer service logs to check for impediments, inefficiencies, and backups.
“On a daily basis it’s important to collect information about your support operation’s basic health,” says Price. “So, real-time, it’s like taking a pulse. Daily, it’s a general health metric.”
If a number of your customer service inquiries weren’t resolved properly on any given day, the collected data can provide insight on the causes of such problems.
Weekly Meetings & Reports
Organizations looking to maintain a high level of customer service will need to focus on not just real-time and daily feedback, but on weekly and long-term customer service metrics, as well. In this short video, Price says that weekly meetings – in addition to metrics-monitoring and goal-setting for the week – are integral to planning and executing your customer service coverage.
“We had two weekly meetings at Amazon,” explains Price. “One was a strategic-type session where we talked about new products we were launching, competitive situations, maybe some stocking questions about the upcoming holiday season or how we did the past holiday season. Then we had a weekly [meeting] that focused on the customer.…If you don’t look at it on a weekly basis someone’s not going to be there for all of the meetings, and there won’t be enough attention to the details.”
Meeting with your team regularly will allow you to monitor the health of your customer support operation and determine exactly what’s going on with your customers via their inquiries, issues, etc. Price says that a weekly meeting is also important from a strategic standpoint because bi-monthly or monthly meetings may leave too much of a reporting and monitoring gap to cover.
Monthly Reports
Customer service reporting can be done on a variety of schedules, to varying degrees of detail. As opposed to real-time, daily, or weekly reporting, monthly customer service monitoring is intended to provide more of an overarching sense of the customer service throughout the company. Whereas frequently recurring reports are meant to be focused on the specifics, monthly reports are geared toward the bigger picture.
“If you’re able to collect customer sentiment issues real-time; if you’re able to look – on a daily basis – at overall input-output ratios of your center; and on a weekly basis, if you’re focusing on the reasons why customers are contacting you and the overall health of the center, there’s really not much need for monthly meetings,” says Price.
However, if a monthly meeting is your only opportunity to measure your customer support team’s performance, it’s important to make that meeting as in-depth as possible, Price adds. Real-time reporting will always be preferential when it comes to addressing specifics, but a monthly report can also help provide an added touch of perspective.
Bill Price founded Driva Solutions, a customer service consultancy, in September 2001. He also co-founded the 10-country LimeBridge Global Alliance and the 33-company Global Operations Council (GOC).
Prior to forming Driva Solutions, Bill was Amazon.com’s first Vice President of Global Customer Service, responsible for all customer service activities including managing the company’s contact centers in the US, Europe, Japan, and India. During these years, Amazon reduced its contacts-per-order by over 70% and also scored the second highest-ever customer satisfaction rating for any American company.
Before Amazon.com, Bill spent 20 years in customer care and services management starting at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco and Stockholm, as COO and CFO with Automated Call Processing Corporation, and later creating the MCI Enhanced Call Router (ECR) and MCI Call Center Services (CCS) divisions.
Bill has authored more than 20 articles and white papers, and the videotapes of his presentations with the University of Washington in 2002 and 2004 continue to be broadcast on television. In 1997 Call Center Magazine named Bill a “Call Center Pioneer” in its first annual award, and in fall 2004 he was asked to be one of the 10 global “CRM Gurus”.