Customer Care Flashcards
(22 cards)
What are the key features of good customer care?
Communicating with customers effectively.
Training staff so that they are knowledgeable about products and services.
Providing a good after-sales service.
Dealing with complaints effectively.
What is a mission statement?
Statement that outlines the organisations main aims and goals. It explains how an organisation will achieve its aims.
Can be used to clearly state how they will treat their customers and other values they wish to associate with.
What are the different customer service policies/strategies?
Written customer care statement/strategy
Service level customer agreement
Complaints procedure
What is a written customer care statement/strategy?
This is a statement about the standards that a customer should expect from an organisation in terms of how the organisation will deal with them, deadlines and quality of service.
What is a service level customer agreement?
This is an agreement between the organisation and the customer that describes what the organisation promises to do and what the customer can expect.
What will the agreement include?
How the organisation will deliver on the promises.
What will happen if the organisation fails to deliver on its promises.
The responsibilities of both the organisation and the customer.
Any hidden or extra costs.
Expected delivery times.
What happens if a promise isn’t met.
What is a complaints procedure?
This is a procedure put in place to show staff and customers the process for dealing with complaints.
What should be covered in a complaints procedure?
All complaints should be taken seriously, logged and given a reference number.
Staff who deal with complaints should be trained appropriately.
All complaints should be acknowledged in some way and some indication of the next steps should be outlined.
Clear timelines should be given to customers and an indication of how long they should expect to wait for a response.
The result of the complaint should be communicated to the customer as soon as possible.
What are the benefits of good customer care?
High staff morale and motivation, which can increase productivity.
Low staff turnover as staff will want to stay in an organisation where there are not many customer complaints- it will also be easier to recruit staff to the organisation.
Increase in sales/profits/revenue for the organisation.
Satisfied customers who will remain loyal to the organisation.
Satisfied customers will also recommend the organisation to others.
Good reputation.
Competitive edge in the market place.
Increase market share.
What are the consequences of poor customer care?
Demotivated staff and low staff morale, which will result in poor working relationships, and ultimately high staff turnover.
Dissatisfied customers who will not return and will not recommend to others, therefore the business will fail to attract new customers.
Loss of the competitive edge and decrease in market share.
Very difficult to build reputation back up.
Downfall of the organisation due to bad publicity.
There will be an increase in the number of complaints that the organisation has to deal with.
What are the methods of monitoring and evaluating customer care?
Mystery shoppers
Questionnaires and surveys (online, written etc.)
Customer focus groups
Loyalty cards
Suggestion schemes
What are mystery shoppers?
This is when someone is employed to act as a customer and report back on the service they receive.
Includes the quality of service received e.g. communication and speed of service.
May also investigate if the staff are following company policies and procedures or complying with legal requirements.
This information is given to staff and any concerns regarding poor standards can be rectified.
Praise may also be given to staff if the mystery shopper has a good experience.
What are the different types of questionnaires and surveys?
Questionnaires
Telephone surveys
Online surveys
Personal interviews
What are questionnaires?
Giving customers a list of questions to fill out that allows them to rate the service.
Difficult to get these back from customers.
Can be costly to send them out and analyse the results.
What is a telephone survey?
When an organisation calls customers to ask them questions to gain feedback about their product or service.
Response is immediate.
People may find this an intrusion of their privacy and may not answer the questions.
What is a personal interview?
When an organisation interviews customers in the street or in a store on a one-to-one basis.
Immediate feedback.
Can be very time-consuming and many people are unwilling to stop and give their opinions.
What is an online survey?
This involves emailing customers and asking them for feedback on a recent purchase.
Fairly inexpensive.
Can survey a wide geographic spread.
Customers can quickly answer the set of questions.
What is a customer focus group?
A focus group is a face-to-face meeting with a group of customers to allow them to provide feedback to an organisation on goods and services.
A focus group allows the organisation to gain immediate feedback from the customer.
Being part of a focus group makes the customer feel valued and think that the organisation will take their opinion into consideration.
The organisation may also gain a more detailed response from the customer as they are able to probe points further.
However, a focus group can be very expensive to arrange as the participants may have to be paid a nominal fee and the cost of travel and a meeting venue would have to be covered.
Also, customers may only tell the organisation what they want to hear and not give any negative feedback.
What are loyalty cards?
Loyalty cards are used to reward customers for their loyalty to an organisation by giving them points that can be exchanged for rewards.
This is a good way of retaining customer loyalty.
Organisations can also use the information from loyalty cards to gain information about their customers and their spending habits.
They can use this information to target customers by gearing special offers on products they buy towards them.
What are suggestion schemes?
A suggestion scheme may be available to encourage customers to leave feedback on the service or product they have received and make any suggestions on how it can be improved.
What are the advantages of suggestion schemes?
They are good for internal use, particularly if there is a reward attached, for example a voucher for each suggestion adopted.
They work well with regular customers for example in hospitality/hotels to ensure the organisation is providing what is required.
What are the disadvantages of suggestion schemes?
Many customers ignore the opportunity to complete feedback slips and as a result feedback may focus only on a very good or very poor customer service.
