Chris Tyrrell
CSE Assessor
(Pic: Emily Hughes)
All of this week, we’ve been publishing the Top Tips to achieving Customer Service Excellence supplied by the eponymous organisation.
When CSE was founded 5 years ago, its target was to work with the public sector to change their approach to customer service. However, they’ve taken their experience and expertise and applied it to the private sector as well, all to help improve customer service within the UK business scene.
The organisation has a series of standard tests. These apply to areas of importance outlined by customers themselves. They include delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism and staff attitude.
They want the standard to become the recognised symbol of excellence, both by businesses themselves and more importantly by the customer. So, with considerable thanks to assessor Chris Tyrrell, here are the final ten top tips on to guarantee excellent customer satisfaction.
1 – Immediately identify any other unspoken assistance needs and arrange for them to be provided
2 – It’s good practice in reception areas to separate out different customer streams
3 – Where the nature of the service is that there are queues (e.g. post offices or call centres), it is good practice to let waiting customers know what the current response waiting time is
4 – If you’ve arranged to meet a customer at their home, ring (if appropriate) to confirm, or if you’re going to be delayed, and always show your identification
5 – Good practice is to ask a customer who uses a wheel chair, a visually impaired customer, and a hearing-impaired customer to experience, and report on the customer journey through your publically accessible areas
6 – Manage customer expectations – keep them informed about the progress of their enquiry, request for service, or complaint
7 – Be careful if you operate a queuing system that issues tickets to those who arrive, in order, and then call them by their appointment time – which will upset those with earlier ticket numbers!
8 – Benchmark your core business performance against sector comparators
9 – Benchmark the timeliness and quality of response to customer contact – but comparators need not necessarily be in the same sector
10 – If you have Service Standards or a Customer Charter or Pledge always review on an annual basis that you actually delivered them and publicise the results to your customers. This will show your promises are genuine and deliverable and will stop them becoming cosmetic statements. As a result you will deliver excellence!
Customer Service Excellence is a quality standard set up and trade marked by the Cabinet Office and is now operated under license by G4S Assessment Services, Centre for Assessment, emqc, and SGS UK. In order for your business to be recognised as achieving Customer Service Excellence, you must be successfully assessed against the Five Criteria of the Standard by one of the licensed certification bodies. For more information please visit http://www.customerserviceexcellence.uk.com