Collecting and storing information about customers is essential to tailoring your customer service program and growing your business. However, there are legal requirements regarding what you can do with the information you have collected.
Any customer information that you collect must comply with business privacy laws, whether you use this information or not. The laws also cover how you can store and use the information.
What types of information to collect? Information includes but is not limited to numerical data, text, and oral information. Quantitative data is data that gives countable facts and figures. This can include information about how many times people use a service and when they use it. It can also seek opinions by using closed questions to ask people to give a score against a series of statements. For example, ‘How would you rate our customer service on a scale of 1 to 5, where one is poor and five is excellent?’ These scores can then be quantified.
Quantitative data is easier to analyse from year to year. Qualitative information is information that tells us what the stakeholders think about performance and about the impact of your organisation. This will mainly come in the form of statements of opinion from customers.
Qualitative information is very useful as it can provide detailed information about how to improve your services. For example, the question ‘What improvements would you like to see to the building?’ can elicit useful ideas for refurbishment.
The drawback with qualitative information is that it is difficult to analyse and compare from year to year. Demographic and Geographic information is useful to gather details about the age, ethnicity, gender, any special needs of customers, where customers live, etc. This kind of information helps to disaggregate your information and understand the views of different types of customers better.
Only ask for personal details if that is absolutely essential and make sure it is clear that such information can be anonymous and untraceable to the individual if they want it to be.
Record information according to company-specific formats and requirements
There are two key ways of collecting information about your customers
- Request feedback directly from your customers
- Monitor internal performance indicators that demonstrate either customer satisfaction or the quality of your customer service.
Direct feedback from customers
To request feedback directly from customers you could consider one or a combination of the following methods.
- Suggestion box/Comments book
- Questionnaires, could be conducted by post, face-to-face, phone, email, or Internet
- Feedback/evaluation sheets
- Focus group
- Participative evaluation processes
- Interviews, phone or face-to-face, could be structured or unstructured
- Complaints procedure
- Interactive wall in an office community centre – providing information and inviting feedback
Some methods require a stronger involvement and commitment from your customers than others. It is worth asking yourself how much feedback your customers want to give. Will they feel empowered or burdened if asked for feedback?
Internal performance indicators
There is a wide range of indicators that you could choose to monitor that will either demonstrate customer satisfaction or the quality of your customer service. These could include the following.
- Numbers of customer complaints, numbers of these complaints resolved
- Sales figures
- Informal feedback is given spontaneously throughout the year
- Accolades and awards
- Trends in new customers and customer retention
- Performance against targets for improving products and services, customer service, and product/service delivery
- Customer requests for new products and services or improvements to the way the services are delivered
- How customers found out about you
- Referrals from partners
- Response times to inquiries from customers
- Surveying your staff to find out whether they think customers are satisfied or not. This information can be compared with customer perception to identify the differences
You need to record information according to company-specific formats and requirements. Specific formats include but are not limited to task sheets, prepared questionnaires, scrapbooks, and folders
Task sheets
CSRs can be issued with Task Sheets to capture information about the Customers when they deal with them. Task sheets can be manual or online.
The information captured will only be contact details and a brief description of the interaction. This is not a very effective way of capturing the details.
Task sheets are helpful because CSRs can use them to verify that they completed all tasks and commitments they made to customers – like sending a report, or giving a call back with results and so on.
Prepared questionnaires
Questionnaires can be a valuable tool for gathering data, especially from a large sample population.
The questionnaire is most frequently a very concise, pre-planned set of questions designed to yield specific information to meet a particular need for research information about a pertinent topic. The research information is obtained from respondents normally from a related interest area. The dictionary definition gives a clearer definition: A questionnaire is a written or printed form used in gathering information on some subject or subject consisting of a list of questions to be submitted to one or more persons.
Scrapbooks
Scrapbooking is a method for preserving customer information in the form of a scrapbook. The customer file will be filled with information on the various customer interactions employees had with the customer. A comprehensive scrapbook will contain information that will help the current CSR assist the customer without having to ask for all the same information again.
Folders
A folder holds loose papers together for organisation and protection. File folders usually consist of a sheet of heavy paper stock or other thin, but stiff, material that is folded in half, and are used to keep paper documents.