The International Customer Service Institute is running a regular Q&A session with internationally recognised service quality experts. These sessions will be periodically published on the TICSI site in the Learning Section and the objective is to share knowledge, ideas and opinions on international best practice. Please feel free to contact the Institute should you be interested in participating and we would be delighted if you would share your opinion with us on the blog.

To keep up with our Q&A sessions please sign up for the TICSI newsletter or visit our Learning Section.

The International Customer Service Institute will run a regular Q&A session with internationally recognised service quality experts. The first of this series is with Kate Dickens, who has over 17 years experience in service quality and business excellence, and has just completed her second book on Service Excellence.

When we hear the term Service Excellence do we really understand how this differs from good customer service? What are the transitory steps an organisation must undertake before they can deliver Service Excellence? Visit our Learning Section and discover what Kate had to say when interviewed by TICSI on the subject.

Click for full interview with Kate Dickens

Shilpa Asnani
Service Quality Executive
The International Customer Service Institute

Businesses have long realized that sustainability with regards to customer service is crucial to their success. Reaching a desired level of service excellence has to be combined with efforts to stay at that level or even improve. For this, many firms dedicate precious human resources in order to continuously track and improve service quality levels. With the help of technology and innovative players in the field of customer service training and consultancy, new and improved products have been developed to assess a firm’s customer service capabilities.

Continue Reading...

During times of an economic uncertainty, when consumer spending goes down considerably, the most appropriate strategy to retain customers seems to be, giving attention to customer service. After the recent financial crisis, a firm’s efforts should be focused on customer retention rather than attracting new customers.

A recession forces firms to cut down costs. These can be in the form of layoffs and/or reduction in marketing/advertising costs. But sometimes companies take cost cutting too far. For example, in order to cut costs, a call centre company reduces the number of call centre agents who are attending to customer’s needs. As a result, customers face long waiting times, which in turn adversely affects their perception of the firm’s customer service. A study conducted by a call centre consultant, at The International Customer Management Institute, suggests that eliminating four customer service agents in a call centre with 36 call centre agents can increase the number of customers put on hold for four minutes from zero to 80. However, to safeguard their position in the market, firms should try to avoid cuts which affect their customer service. If not done so, the firm may end up losing valuable customers in difficult times.

Continue Reading...

We live in a world of innovation. Most of the companies today aim at creating new and improved products and services, of which they are sole providers. In this era, competitor information is highly sought for and in the midst of the battle to get ahead of the competition, benchmarking seems to be evolving as the latest management fashion.

The word ‘benchmark’ originally refers to a reference point to compare measures against. There are several theories about where the word ‘benchmark’ came from. In previous times benchmark may have been used in fishing contests where the length of a fish is marked on a wooden bench or it may have originated through a cobbler’s effort to measure size according to a predefined one (Andersen & Pettersen, 1996). In an organisational setting, benchmarking originated with Xerox Business Systems in the late 1970s. But at that time benchmarking was used to make the organisation aware that their performance was not up to the mark as compared to others in the industry. Also, it set an example for Xerox showing them that someone had already made the improvements. Today, organisation performance benchmarking can perhaps best be defined as the practice of being humble enough to admit that someone else is better at something and being wise enough to learn how to match or even surpass them at it (APQC, 1993).

Continue Reading...