1. Customer Service NVQ Session 1: Monitoring Quality of Customer Service
Kate Fairweather
CMCAust Marketing
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

2. Business Skills Programme
Monitoring Quality of Customer Service
Working relationships and effective communications
Team performance management and development
Personal development and managing yourself
Managing Change
Leadership and Management
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

3. Session Objectives By the end of this session you will be able to –
Decide what quality of service criteria to use to judge customer service quality
Set ratings for each quality of service criteria to assess your own and your colleagues’ performance
Select a representative sample of customer transactions to monitor
Use good practice for observing customer service
Analyse results and report them
Give positive feedback to colleagues
Identify coaching and training options to improve customer service delivery
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

4. Links to other sessions
Other sessions cover:
Working relationships so that you can implement your ideas
Effective communications to present results well
Performance review interviews to give you confidence when discussing results with colleagues
Developing people to improve their customer service
Managing change in your workplace so you know if your changes are being effective
This session looks at how you can objectively monitor customer service transactions and deliver improvements
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

5. How Are You Going to Judge Customer Service?
Remember that you will only do this so that you can develop and improve performance of colleagues, to build up your organisation’s customer service quality and retain customer loyalty
What does your organisation value, how do you describe a good customer service experience?
Speed of answering the phone
Personal welcome for each customer
Customer understands what’s being provided
Customer looked after at all stages
Customer offered additional services
Customer agrees call back/appointment
Remember to choose things that are important and that you can measure by observation, survey, from your customer records etc.
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

6. How do you rate each criteria?
For each measure of customer service quality you need to develop a rating – what behaviours demonstrate excellent service – rate 1, what meets normal expectations – rate 2, what is not good enough – rate 3
Speed of answering the phone: 1 = within 2 rings, 2= within 5 rings, 3=over 5 rings
Personal welcome: 1= customer greeted by name on arrival, reception knows their history and details of current visit, = customer greeted by name on arrival, reception has to check details, 3= reception has to ask customer for their name
Customer looked after at all stages: 1= team member hands over to next person personally with full details of customer requirements, 2= team member hands over with outline of customer needs, 3= team member passes customer over without any information to colleague
BUT you need to consider the experience and skills of the person being measured, and ensure your ratings are fair and impartial, check the ACAS website for advice on measuring performance fairly
You also need to note the environment in which the observation happens – busy or quiet, difficult or easy customer, new or existing customer, if the computers are working slowly, if there is a new factor for colleagues to deal with like a change of system, as all these may affect the individual’s ability to deliver good service
You also need to introduce the idea of rating customer service carefully so that people do not feel persecuted or criticised – management need to support and you need to sell the idea of doing this to colleagues with clear reasons why you think it’s a good idea, why it will be good for the business
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

7. Example of Setting Criteria and Ratings
Best Service (rating 1)
OK Service
(rating 2)
Needs improvement (rating 3)
Personal welcome for every customer
Greets customer by name as they arrive, uses name
Greets customer as they arrive and asks for name, uses name
Does not greet customer as they arrive, fails to ask for or use name
Customer looked after at each stage
Personal hand over to next team member with outline of requirement
Send customer through and message requirement to next team member
Send customer through with no information to next team member
Activity 1:
Note down a set of criteria you could use to judge customer service in your organisation and consider the ratings that would describe the best service, OK service and inadequate service – see example above.
Discuss your list with your colleagues and agree some things to start to measure and your rating scale.
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

8. Selecting a Reliable Sample
Market research relies on sampling – selecting a small number of the population to interview and using the results to represent the whole population
Based on a normal distribution of features and attitudes in a population – e.g. there is a relatively small variance in height of people, a few percent are very tall or very small
You can select a surprisingly small number of people to be your reliable sample but you must make sure it is representative and prevent bias
Height
Number of People
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

9. The Sampling Frame
The level of sampling transactions that is statistically reliable, and gives you unbiased results
Based on the number of customers and how many times they contact you = the population OR on the number of customer transactions the team handles every week
There are statistical tables that tell you how many transactions you need to sample for a reliable result, so you can draw effective conclusions, see
To reduce bias you need to take a random sample and also ensure you look at examples of different situations and customers, so observe on different times of day, days of week, times of year, busy and less busy times, looking at all team members, and across a range of customers – easy going, difficult, gender, age, background
BUT be practical – as long as you look at a variety of situations you only need to check each member of staff a few times to see how well they deal with customers right now, and perhaps repeat this check every month or so to see how their performance varies over time: the aim is to help them to improve not persecute them!
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

10. How many customers do you have?
Activity 2
How many customers do you have?
How many contacts do they have with you in a year?
So how many transactions do you have with customers in a year?
Divide by 12 to work out a number of transactions a month.
This is your population.
However as you are checking the effectiveness of your colleagues you can take your population as the number of transactions the team complete in a month, and you should sample at the level suggested by the sampling table.
Using the sampling table select the number of transactions you need to check – use the 95% confidence level and 2.5% error margin column, these are reasonably accurate and your results will be correct to within plus or minus 2.5%
So if your result says 80% of customers happy with the service they get your actual result for the population could be 77.5% or 82.5%
As long as you choose a range of transactions to reflect the types of customer they usually handle, cover busy and less busy times and you spread the sampling over a number of days so you get a picture of their behaviour over a period of time rather than on one day, you should avoid most potential sources of bias
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

11. Good Practice for Observation
Make sure your colleague knows that you will be observing them, over what period and that they understand what you are checking and why – no surprises!
Be as unobtrusive as possible, stay out of their eyeline, use a clip board or tablet to quickly cover the ratings
Be aware that many people do not do their best work under scrutiny, and nerves may kick in, so no song and dance!
Give them time to relax into their job before you start monitoring
Consider opportunities for ad hoc checks when they don’t even realise you are observing them to get a true picture
Think about ways that you can check work in addition to observation e.g. documentation completed, customer feedback, feedback from other colleagues
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

12. Activity 3
Describe how you plan to observe your colleagues, explaining how you will select the number of times you need to see them to avoid bias and produce a reliable result.
Produce a one page sheet that you will use when observing, containing the criteria you are going to judge, and the rating scale you will use, columns to cover busy or quiet times, any unusual circumstances that were happening. See example below:
When you are ready complete your observations and keep each ratings sheet you produce (on paper or electronically)
Name
Date/
time
Busy/Quiet
Criteria
Rating
Reason for rating/notes
Personal welcome for every customer
Customer looked after at each stage
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

13. Analysing Your Data and Reporting
Once you have your results for the month you need to analyse your data
Add results together for each team member and for the whole team, divide by the number of times you have observed to get an average result – this will enable you to report the overall team rating for the month, and the rating for each team member
You should also look at trends in overall and individual performance – is service consistent or are there particular circumstances that make service better or worse? Has service improved or worsened since the last time you did a check – you should be able to build up a picture over time
You should report the facts from your data, but also comment on them from your position as an expert – produce specific examples of excellence that others can learn from or poor practise that you can suggest ways of preventing in future
Prepare your proposals for developing individuals, how much can be done through on-job coaching, team role plays, in house training, online courses, formal external training – assess the costs of these options in terms of cost of external training, your time to provide support and team member time to take the development activity
Report to management and agree how to manage feedback to the team, including whether managers need to be at individual feedback meetings, what development actions are required and what coaching and training you can access to improve performance
Gain agreement for the development activities to be formally noted on Personal Development Plans for each individual with a commitment from the organisation and the individual to schedule development actions – See the Personal Development Workshop for a Personal Development Plan format
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

14. Provide a review of the agreed next steps from this presentation.
Activity 4
See the observation notes in the sample file attached and analyse these results for the team and individuals: What are the average ratings? Comment on the overall team performance, strengths and weaknesses. What recommendations would you make to improve team performance? Prepare a short report containing your analysis and recommendations.
When you have completed your own observations analyse your results to show average ratings for the team and each individual.
Add comments on where you feel there a particular strengths and weaknesses in the team, and in which circumstances people do better or less well.
Research and cost the options for individual development – how much can be done in-house with on-job coaching, team role plays, in-house training sessions (who will design and deliver these?), external training – online sessions or courses, formal training workshops.
Produce a report with recommendations on sharing good practise and improving overall performance and present to your management.
Provide a review of the agreed next steps from this presentation.
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

15. Giving Feedback
Giving feedback to individuals must be handled well and fairly – check the ACAS Managing Performance leaflet form their website for advice: This is effectively a performance appraisal (see Team Performance Management Workshop)
Make sure all team members are aware that there will be individual feedback so that you can help people to improve and offer support and development
Hold meetings with individuals in a private place where you won’t be disturbed
Prepare for the meeting, have your points written down
Make people comfortable, start with positives, what they did well
Move onto areas where they would benefit from development – e.g. dealing with angry customers, what to do if there is a query they do not know how to answer, ask them for their views on these situations and listen to them, explain your assessment using the evidence from your check
Present actions for development – coaching or training – that will help them to improve their customer service delivery, and seek their agreement to these actions
Record the agreed outcomes from these feedback meetings and ensure the individual has a copy, together with managers or HR as appropriate
Take responsibility for ensuring that development agreements are actioned
Keep copies of all your records of checks on individuals and agreed action plans so that you can track effectiveness of development activities on overall performance
These records may be used in overall performance reviews and possibly in disciplinary or grievance cases in future
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

16. Positives/good practise Examples of weaknesses
Activity 5
Using your analysis for the example observations at Activity 4 prepare your feedback notes for each team member (Sam, Viv and Frankie) using the format below: Start with the positives and give examples of good practise. Then move onto examples where things went less well – remember to focus on the individual’s behaviours not their personal characteristics. Prepare your proposals for that individual’s development – on job coaching, team role play difficult situations, in house or external training (online options are worth investigating). Draft your proposals on the Personal Development Plan format attached or your organisation’s development planning form.
When you have completed your own project prepare your feedback points for each team member using their individual results as a basis for the discussion.
Team Member
Positives/good practise
Examples of weaknesses
Proposed development to offer
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

17. Review of this session We covered
Identifying quality of service criteria and setting ratings to assess your own and your colleagues’ performance
How to select a representative sample of customer transactions to monitor
Good practice for observing customer service
How to analyse results and report them
How to give positive feedback to colleagues
How to identify coaching and training options to improve customer service delivery
If you are taking a Customer Service NVQ with CMC Aust then now your work from Activities 1 to 5 to Kate Fairweather at for assessment of learning and feedback
Places to find out more – search internet on any subject or theorist, these web sites are useful
Monitoring customer service Ways-To-Monitor-Your-Customer-Service
your-customer-service/161867
Sample sizes advisors.com/tools/SampleSize.htm
Variance
Giving and Getting Feedback
ACAS Model Workplace, advice and all employment legislation
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather

18. Customer Service NVQ
This workshop provides the underpinning knowledge for Unit D13 and D8 of the Customer Service NVQ Diploma at Level 3 plus NVQs at Level 4, 3 and 2 in Management and Business Administration
For the Unit you will need to produce for your NVQ Assessor:
Your account of setting up monitoring of customer service, how you agreed it with colleagues, how you conducted your observations and reported, and fed back to colleagues, what the outcome was
Support this with your initial criteria and ratings list, your completed observation notes, your report to management, your feedback notes from meetings with individuals
If you would like to take an NVQ please contact me, Kate Fairweather , or go to our website where you will find details
21/01/2014
(c) Auth K Fairweather