The Customer Service Survey
Competitive Customer Service Information
Tue - February 12, 2008 02:38 PM in
One of the hardest nuts to crack in the call center business is measuring the quality of customer service at competing companies.
It's easy to find out, for example, which bank charges higher fees or has more convenient hours. It's really hard to find out which bank will keep you waiting on hold longer, or which bank is more likely to fix your statement error on the first call.
This is a problem both for consumers and for companies. Consumers would really benefit from better information in deciding which company to do business with, and companies would benefit from a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
Competitive customer service data is hard to collect because it requires measuring a number of key metrics on a large number of individual calls on an ongoing basis. A neutral third party is needed to collect and compile the data in a way which will protect the competitive interests of individual companies while constructing meaningful benchmarks, but few companies are interested in providing anything more than the most superficial self-reported statistics.
Our old SectorPulse product provided some competitive customer service data, though it was with a limited sample and limited to the largest companies in the industries we tracked. Our Service Quality Tracker also attacks this problem, and we're planning to expand it with more industries, more companies, and a larger sample size.
What we're hoping to provide is something like a Consumer Reports of customer service: a credible source of information about customer service quality for both companies and consumers. We hope to give consumers a meaningful way to tell which companies are easy to do business with, and give companies a clear idea of how they stack up and what they could do better.
Posted by Peter Leppik
This is a problem both for consumers and for companies. Consumers would really benefit from better information in deciding which company to do business with, and companies would benefit from a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
Competitive customer service data is hard to collect because it requires measuring a number of key metrics on a large number of individual calls on an ongoing basis. A neutral third party is needed to collect and compile the data in a way which will protect the competitive interests of individual companies while constructing meaningful benchmarks, but few companies are interested in providing anything more than the most superficial self-reported statistics.
Our old SectorPulse product provided some competitive customer service data, though it was with a limited sample and limited to the largest companies in the industries we tracked. Our Service Quality Tracker also attacks this problem, and we're planning to expand it with more industries, more companies, and a larger sample size.
What we're hoping to provide is something like a Consumer Reports of customer service: a credible source of information about customer service quality for both companies and consumers. We hope to give consumers a meaningful way to tell which companies are easy to do business with, and give companies a clear idea of how they stack up and what they could do better.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 02:38 PM | | | | |