What Is Customer Service?

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We have identified that successful approaches to "Improving Customer Service" have 10 key concepts in common: (1) Commitment from the top and ownership throughout the organisation. (2) A clearly defined customer service policy. (3) A customer service survey identifying the levels of internal and external customer service. (4) Improvement of systems and "hardware" in the early stages. (5) The establishment of a service-orientated organisational structure and communications. (6) The agreement of standards and documentation so that everyone understands what is required. (7) Measurement of customer service performance and development of improvement action plans at all levels. (8) Skills development to equip people to do the defined job. (9) Publicity for your standards, both internally and externally. (10) Monitoring on-going improvement. The process is never ending and continuously seeks to understand and achieve customer satisfaction.

How Can We Help You?

We can help you implement any or all of the 10 key concepts depending on your own resources.

A. Consultancy

Our consultancy input would support your effective approach to any or all of the 10 key concepts. The best starting point for any worthwhile improvement in the level of customer service must be an objective examination of your current situation - The Customer Service Survey. 

The result would be an improvement action plan to take you forward. Once this process has started, there is a need to introduce a measure to monitor and maintain a continuously improving customer service culture.

We have developed our Customer Confidence Index (CCI) which provides a real time measure of customer service performance at all levels of the organisation. It ensures that customer service takes its important place alongside other key business parameters such as profits, costs and volumes.

The CCI offers a number of real benefits to organisations committed to developing an "Improving Customer Service" culture. These include:

• Providing senior management and all staff with a regular and complete measure of customer confidence across the organisation
• Pulling together the understanding of customer confidence on a real time and individual basis across the organisation
• Helping all staff to appreciate the customer service objectives and integrating their own input to meet those objectives
• Measuring trends
• Providing a measure for internal and external comparison
• Identifying and recognising good practice
• Providing a measure to identify and evaluate current and future initiatives
• Developing a continuously improving customer service action plan

B. Training and Development

Customer service training and development is tailor-made to support your approach to "Improving Customer Service". It could cover some or all of the following areas:

• Understanding the process of "Improving Customer Service" at all levels throughout the organisation including the external and internal customer and supplier
• Identifying the elements of the customer service mix
• Defining the policy and organisation for improving customer service
• Designing the system to measure customer service performance at all levels
• Carrying out a customer service survey

The length of training and development will depend on your organisation's needs. In-house programmes are usually based on a series of workshops for the various levels and functions involved. Consultancy and training can be carried out separately or as a unique combination to meet your needs.

What Do Our Clients Say?

• "The whole process has proved a considerable step forward in the identification of key performance indicators for improving customer service, and also the team's awareness of the potential effects on the customer and on each other"
• "The CCI was tailored to our specific needs. It is not a standard "off the shelf" package. The finished CCI is our product"
• "The Manor Consulting Group has a real understanding or our culture"