Most customer service performance measures are worse than doing nothing

Benjamin P. Taylor
1 min readMar 22, 2021

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>> What was your worst customer experience recently? And what did they do to learn?

The *silliest* a business can do is ask me to mark the agent out of ten. That tells you nothing about whether your processes are working or not. If the agent gets the blame because the organisation is incompetent, you lose the learning.

Instead, you should measure:

> Did we get it right, first time? Look for opportunities to reduce avoidable contact and improve your services.

> How much effort did the *customer* have to put in? The *best* indicator of long-term success.

> How many contacts are we receiving overall? If you can reduce the *need* for the customer to contact you, it’s a BIG win/win
Customer DISsatisfaction — let the customer tell you HOW TO DO BETTER!

> Last and LEAST — are we answering the phone and being nice — you do need to check the basics, but be *very careful* you aren’t driven by them

Break these measures down based on the different services you offer — as defined by the customer.

So, what was *your* worst customer experience recently? And did the organisation let itself learn *anything*?

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