The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers

NEW METRICS FOR MEASURING THE CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE

Social media has brought the need to provide outstanding customer service back to the forefront of business strategy. Business customers as well as consumers have mobile devices right at their fingertips, which allow them to interact with their social networks on a regular basis. Today, when something goes wrong from the customer perspective, they not only get mad, they go straight to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites to vent their frustrations.

I have been waiting on the phone for my sales rep for 15 minutes! Come on, Company XYZ, are you there?

Or,

I attended a concert at ABC Amphitheater last night, and the sound was terrible. I'm never going back there. Fail.

What does this mean for companies, large and small? It means the public practice of customer service has become a business imperative. Customer service successes, as well as failures, are easily visible to customers and competitors alike. As a result, the metrics being used today to measure the results of traditional customer service interactions are not entirely adequate to capture this “new world.” Some rethinking is required. That's not to say we should abandon existing metrics, only that businesses have to figure out how to incorporate ways of measuring new, digital interactions in order to understand the success (or failure) of their customer service processes.

To adjust to this shift, we need to keep in mind the customer expectations of a service ...