What is customer service efficiency? How can you determine what “efficient customer service” is? In order to answer these questions, first you need to define what customer service efficiency looks like.
Consider several key questions in evaluating how efficient your organization is with respect to effective customer service:
How efficiently your customers access your products and services — is it easy, simple, fast, error free, user friendly, and cordial?
How efficiently your company processes information, related to:
Order fulfillment, delivery, confirmation, and tracking
Customer information — buying tendencies, interests
Self help, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Response to questions, inquiries
How efficiently your company tracks and executes change management of:
Customer and market desires, new requirements
Product and services — changes in design, development, creation, provision, delivery, and effectiveness
How efficiently your company manages financial aspects, such as:
Billing — is it easy, simple, fast, error free?
Customer accounts — tracking, reporting, customer access
One common way to determine efficiency in customer service is to look at how easy it is for customers to find and buy your products and services, and contact you if they have any questions. In other words, how easy are you to reach?
Another way to determine efficiency is to look at how easily customers can locate, purchase, confirm, track, receive, and complete their orders without any assistance. How well can they find answers to key questions regarding your products and services totally by themselves at their convenience, not just during normal business hours?
Of course, when customers do contact you, another measure of efficiency is to determine how well you respond to them in terms of timeliness, accuracy, and issue resolution.
Becoming customer-centric is a process that requires focus, effort, and action in certain strategic areas.