Purpose: Rating Service Quality in America Today

The purpose of this blog is to record 100 days of service in America.  I will record the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff of the places where I spend money everyday.  Along the way, I will develop a measurable rating of dollars spent to service quality received.  I will approach each transaction with the same pleasantness and see the response.  I will say in a pleasant tone “Good Morning,” “Good Afternoon,” or “Good Evening.”  I will return a smile when one is offered to me and will end each transaction with “Have a Good Day or Evening.”  I will record whether the person helping me said hello first, smiled, was helpful and whether they said “Thank You.”  Something I believe all companies want to do at a minimum. 

 

 Service will be evaluated on five basic actions.  First, did the customer service rep (C-REP) acknowledge me or did I have to make them aware of my presence.  Second, did the C-REP smile.  Third was the C-REP functionally efficient.  In other words, did they complete the task required to service the customer?  Was it done in a timely manner with a smooth transaction?  Fourth, were they friendly, enthusiastic or engaged? FEE Notice the word OR in this aspect of the evaluation.  Many C-REP’s say hello first and smile but are very focused on their tasks and do not show enthusiasm.   Others can be very friendly but not overly engaged which cause a problem with the efficiency of the encounter.  (This is how I intend to be as a customer at all times as I am not always enthusiastic about dropping off my dry cleaning)  Any one of the FEE will suffice.  Fifth did the C-REP thank me at the close of the experience?    

Scoring?

 1. Acknowledgment: 1 point.  Not much of a reach here.  Failure to acknowledge is downright rude.

2.  Smile: 3 points.  Huge and I predict the biggest miss of C-REP to come. A smile says it all.

3.  Efficiency: 2 points.  The task is why I am there but in today’s market I have many choices for services I need so they better get it right.

4.       FEE: 2 points.  Finding a customer service rep to exude any one of these is so rare today.

5.       Thank: 1 point.  Again not a reach, I’ve trained my 3 year old to do it.  (Most of the time)

Bonus: 1 point.  A bonus will happen when all five criteria above are met and will be indicated with a smiley face on the top of the post.  Let’s see how many businesses are performing as they believe they are.  Notice that missing just one action knocks the score to at least 8 from a potential of 10.  Here is why…

Why do This?

Within ten minutes from my home there are eight grocery stores from Whole Foods (2) to Walmart.  There are a dozen dry cleaners, three pet stores, two office supply outlets and thousands of restaurant seats from every chain in America.  I travel regularly and have plenty of choices for airlines, rental cars and hotels within my travel budget.  My point is, our base need is easily met.  It is the individual human experience which must dictate our decisions moving forward.   This exercise will help me to understand the behavior of the person interacting with the customer (the C-REP) to how much money is spent.    This is something I will call interaction cost.  I have categories for businesses which hit all points called “Perfection!” as well as ”No Smile” and “No Thank You” categories.  Review them and see how surprising it is. 

 

Update:

As many readers and now potential readers know, I am in the customer service business myself.  What has been most beneficial about this exercise is using it as a tool to look in the mirror and see how our business is doing.  An example of this was finding out how many times a genuine “Thank You” is not said after a transaction.  Have a good day is nice enough but really means nothing.  A genuine thank you is something I now look for from all of our people.  I have a neighbor who I don’t particularly care for and suspect he feels pretty-much the same about me.  But each morning as we see each other heading to work we say, “Have a nice day.”  At night it’s, “Have a good night”  and so on we go.  I now think about this every time it is said to me after spending my hard earned money somewhere.  The point is just say “thank you.”  It actually means something to the customer.