Increase sales with excellent service quality

Service quality includes all factors that influence how a customer evaluates the services offered by a provider. The quality is based on the expectations of a customer and depends on the offers and the appearance of the company as well as the behavior and the expectations of the customer.

Those who offer their customers good service will not only increase customer satisfaction, but will also benefit themselves. A satisfied customer is usually also a loyal customer who will gladly buy a product again or book another service. 

Furthermore, satisfied customers are happy to recommend a company positively to friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc., which thus provides you with free advertising in the form of word of mouth and referral marketing. Also, the customer may post a public review or testimonial on the Internet, which increases the reach of your brand/company. 

Therefore, you should aim to always match your own service quality to your customer’s needs and exceed expectations.

Your customer should have a positive experience with you at all times. Because negative experiences lead to negative reviews and financial losses. 

Service quality is a process composed of many small building blocks. All these building blocks have an influence on customer satisfaction. In order to improve your service quality, you should first of all know the factors that lead to good service quality.  

In the following we have explained the influencing factors:

1. Reachability

If you want to provide a good quality of service, you should not hide from the prospects as well as customers and their questions and problems. Do not make contacting you a search and guessing game, but make contacting you unproblematic and possible through various channels. 

Also, especially in the case of telephone support or advice, reachability on your part should be guaranteed. That is, if the customer needs you, then you should definitely be available. The same applies to e-mails or other communication channels offered. Make sure that the mailboxes are not full or that a notification is sent to the customer or forwarded to a colleague if you are absent.

2. Speed

Clearly, not only is reachability a factor in good service, but also the speed or response time that follows. 

How quickly a problem can be resolved is also a critical factor in customer satisfaction with your service. Customers don’t like to wait long for their problem to be answered or resolved. The faster, the better. 

3. Friendliness

The tone makes the music. 

Friendliness and politeness are basic requirements for good service. Even if customers complain loudly or they are angry. Customer service should not lose its composure and should give customers the feeling that they are in good hands, both professionally and personally. 

4. Competence

If you want to give customers the best possible advice or help them solve their problems, you need the necessary expertise. Right from the start, the customer should have the feeling that he is being looked after by an expert. 

Honesty toward the customer is also crucial to competence. If, for example, the service employee is out of his depth when the customer asks a question, he should communicate this to the customer and call in a colleague who can answer the question. 

This behavior not only creates trust, but also esteem, as the customer is not given false information. 

5. Accuracy

Accuracy is about the extent to which customers’ wishes and expectations are met and how precisely and to what extent their questions are answered.

The more precise, the better. In the best case, the prospect or customer should not have any unanswered questions or a feeling of doubt after the conversation.

6. Efficiency

If you want to offer a good service, you also need the appropriate resources. Thus personnel, authority, technology and financial means. 

The customer should be helped in the best possible way with little to no waiting time and professional competence.   

Since we have previously explained which influencing factors there are for the quality of a service, we can now give recommendations here on how to improve it. 

For this purpose, we have listed 8 ways to improve your service quality:  

1. Identify customer needs

Match the service you offer to customer expectations and needs. Not only as a whole, but also flexibly to each individual client. Take difficulties from him and try to relieve him.

2. Be reachable 

What would be a good service without a good reachability. Provide enough resources and contact options so that the prospect or client can reach them well. 

3. Be friendly

Friendliness and a good tone pay off. Even if customers become uncomfortable or express their displeasure loudly, always remain polite. In the end, it usually does you no good to be unfriendly to the customer as well. 

4. Surprise positively

Provide a surprise effect for your customers from time to time. For example, offer additional services for free or give them discount codes for the next service. 

The positive surprise effect can lead not only to increased customer satisfaction, but also to them recommending you positively to acquaintances or writing you a good review on the Internet. 

5. Keep promises

Promise your customers only what you can deliver. This includes, for example, appointments to repair the car, the timely delivery of goods or the promise of discounts.  

6. Ask for feedback

If you don’t ask, you don’t win. To provide your customers with an exceptional service experience, you don’t have to look into a crystal ball. Simply ask for feedback. For example, use an online questionnaire to inquire about what you can improve about service quality and what the customer would like to see from you. 

7. Analyze service regularly

There is no point in just offering the service, you should also perform it in the best possible way. For this, your service offerings need to be analyzed and evaluated from time to time. Only then you can initiate improvements to increase the service quality. 

Optimization, optimization, optimization. Customer requirements and, above all, their expectations are constantly changing. Therefore, you must regularly adapt yourself and the service to meet these changes. Otherwise, the customer will quickly become an ex-customer and find their new home with the competition.  

8. Expand service

Try to expand your service offering from time to time. For example, regularly check with your competitors to see what new services they offer, or come up with your own to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Stay contemporary and provide a positive surprise.

You can measure and evaluate service quality in many ways. Well-known examples are expert observations, service tests, mystery shopping and mystery calling/mailling. 

Furthermore, you can also use social media monitoring to find out how people talk about you, your products and services in social media. 

But another method still offers the best way to measure service quality either in total or for specific influencing factors. It is the (online) questionnaire.

(Online) questionnaires still offer the best option today to ask for feedback from your customers in a simple and cost-efficient way, collecting valuable information in the process. 

Especially online survey tools like easyfeedback help you very well to collect the required feedback and to automatically prepare the data in charts and tables. With the many evaluation functions, you can also go deeper into the analysis and also read between the lines what the feedback provider does not tell you directly.

As already mentioned, you can measure service quality as a whole, for example, with our offered survey template. However, you can also focus on individual influencing factors. 

For example, ask customers how satisfied they are with the accessibility of your customer service using the customer effort score. This is because this metric measures how much effort a customer had to put in to have a problem or question solved by customer service. 

Another example of how online surveys can be used to measure service quality is the degree to which customers are willing to recommend a company to others. Here, aspects such as friendliness, helpfulness, competence and more are included in a key figure. This key figure gives you an initial indication of whether the service quality offered should be optimized. 

With the Net Promotor Score (NPS), you can measure this willingness to recommend in a simple way with just one question. However, you can also ask for an assessment of the service employee’s competence after each e-mail contact with customer service.

As you can see, surveys give you the opportunity to measure service quality in a wide variety of ways.