Managing Service Quality: The Customer Is Always Right

Service-quality improvements need to be thought through in advance and managed.

Customer information systems (CIS) are almost never justified and implemented to realize dramatic gains in quality of service. Revenue improvements? Yes. Rates management flexibility? You bet. Delinquency and write-off improvements? Sure. Statutory pressure, including introduction of deregulation? Maybe not as often these days, but still true. Technology consistency, supportability, and application integration? Absolutely. This means service-quality improvement needs to be thought through in advance and managed.

External Customer Service Quality

External customer service quality is probably the most talked about area of service quality delivery, and there are several meaningful standards already in use that can be measured prior to implementing a new CIS and managed closely through going live and stabilization. First, the easy ones:

• Average speed of answer or average hold time equates directly to customer satisfaction and, curiously, can directly correlate to average call length. An angry call is a long call.
• Number of calls per billed customer and per billing cycle should be tracked and trended.
• Bad bill complaints, justified or not, should be measured, and satisfaction with resolution of bill complaints should at least be sampled.
• Timeliness of field calls and satisfaction with the outcomes are both meaningful.
• Executive and regulator complaint letters, justified or not, are important indicators. They should be tracked and reported.

Two difficult-to-capture areas of customer service diagnostics can lead to great improvements: