Customers contact your utility every day. They have a
problem. They need help understanding their bill. They’re interested in
another product or service. If you asked every customer who called or walked
into your customer-service office during the next week to rate his or her
experience with your utility, how would you fare?
If you aren’t measuring your customer service, it’s tough
to know how you’re doing and where you need to improve. If you aren’t
measuring consistently, you’re only making an educated guess as to the quality
of your service.
Measure Your Existing Customers’ Experience. The
only way to know if your standards are being used is to measure them. Hire a
third party to survey a sampling of customers who recently interacted with
your utility. Make the survey calls no more than three to five days after the
customer’s interaction.
Having surveyed many utilities, I find it amazing what
customers tell us about their experiences. Unfavorable feedback often reflects
a desire for small things to be done differently. The customer usually isn’t
asking for something unreasonable. Often, they’re concerned about poor
communication and attitude.
Measure Your New Customers’ Perception. New
customers come to your utility every month to establish service and purchase
additional services. Many of them come from other utilities and they have may
have their own ideas about good customer service. To measure their service
experience, hire an outside company to walk into and call your company several
times a month posing as a new customer.
Create Customer-Service Benchmarks. After we
survey customers that have recently interacted with utilities, management
immediately wants to know how the company is doing. When we conduct another
assessment 90 days later, management asks if service has improved. Create a
measurement for each of your customer-service standards that then serve as
your benchmark. It is from this base that you should strive for improvement.
Survey a sampling of your customers monthly to evaluate
the effectiveness of the skills your employees demonstrate in their
interactions with customers. The only way to know if you’re improving is to
measure the customer’s experience and your staff’s performance.
It’s critical that you share the results of these surveys
with your staff. This will give them a clear picture of where they are and
where they should be.
Use Measurement As A Coaching Tool. Feedback from
your new and existing customers will often flush out inefficient processes and
systems that may hamper your staff’s ability to perform at their best. It
also helps you identify the people and skills that need the most improvement.
Then it’s up to management to use these results in a positive manner to coach
and educate your staff on how to improve. All coaching should be done in a
positive manner to reap the greatest impact. None of us likes to be “wrong.”
Coaching delivered with an attitude of an opportunity for improvement will be
well received.
Measurement Reinforces Consistency. Public
utilities want to provide excellent service and employees often believe they
do. But when we share the results of our measurement with the staff, as well
as feedback we receive from customers and potential customers, they develop a
new awareness about improving customer interactions.
When your staff sees the areas where they’re doing well
and where there are opportunities for improvement, when they see what
customers actually say about their experience, employees’ perception of the
quality of the service they provide begins to change and so does their
behavior.
The key to excellent customer service is for every
employee to follow service standards consistently in every interaction. Every
customer counts every single time! Not just when the boss walks
by or if the customer is polite, but with every single interaction -not matter
what. The utility’s reputation and bottom-line are at risk. It’s critical
that your staff consistently demonstrates the standards you have created.
Measure Your Internal Processes. A customer
completes an application for service, someone needs an extension of service to
a new residence, another person calls with a trouble ticket, a delinquent
customer wants to pay their bill before their service is terminated – the
processes behind each of these situations, along with others you perform
daily, have an impact on your customers and the service they receive.
Step into your customer’s shoes and experience the way
you do things. For example, measure the process when a new customer requires
service to a new residence. What does the CSR do to make the customer
understand and feel comfortable with how new service is established? When the
work order is handed off to engineering and then to construction for
completion, does everyone involved know the status of that order? Is someone
checking to see if it’s scheduled for a timely completion? If not, then what
happens? Are engineering and construction keeping the customer service
department in the loop with any complications? Is your customer kept
informed?
Examine your processes and measure their effectiveness.
One of the best ways to identify opportunities for procedural improvement is
to ask your employees what they would do differently. Your front-line staff
has incredible insight, as they are the ones dealing every day with your
customers and your procedures. They already know what could be done to make
things better for customers.
So, if you called the last 40 customers who visited or
contacted your utility and asked them to rate you on a scale of 1 – 4 with 4
being outstanding, how many of them would give you a top rating?
You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it!
