Customer Service Excellence Checklist

With a help of this Customer Service Excellence Action Plan you will find out some ways on how you
may reach a proper level of interacting with your clients. This Action Plan comprises:
 How to set adequate standards of customer service excellence;
 How to promote and secure these standards;
 How to manage Customer Expectations;

Customer Service Excellence Checklist:

 Customer service excellence starts with a focus on people. An organization needs to incorporate service
standards into on-the-job guidelines for the employees who deal with the customers, and continually
monitor & improve employee adherence to these standards;
 In order to define adequate standards of excellence it is necessary to:
o Determine customer expectations (respect, anticipation of their needs, speed of service, etc);
o Minimize the gap between expectations and how they are perceived by the management;
o Translate the real customer expectations into service quality specifications;
o Define a way to measure adherence of employees to customer service quality specifications;
 In order to secure these standards you need to:
o Control the difference between specifications and actual customer service performance;
o Minimize the discrepancy between service announced and service delivered in reality;
o Control the customer perception of the actual customer service performance (you may apply
different methods such as surveys, mystery shoppers, etc);
o Control the gap between customers’ expectations and their perception of service they get;
 Remember about the “magical” formula of Customer Service Excellence:
Customer Satisfaction = Your Performance/Customer Expectations;
 When identifying the Customer Expectations you need to qualify their level as well:
o Ideal expectations: a way to a complete customer satisfaction, delight and loyalty;
o Normative expectations: for example an item that is sold at an expensive price is associated
automatically with a good quality and an outstanding level of service;
o Experience-based norms: the objective observations on problems of your customer service, which
occur in some conditions (for example slow service when overloaded with requests);
o Acceptable expectations: something which is needless to say about, for example basic level of
politeness in conversations, adequate speed of service, etc;
o Minimum tolerable expectations: if the service is terrible, then at least the cost is very low;
 Policies and efforts of your staff need to strive towards:
o Matching the Ideal expectations;
o Not violating the Acceptable expectations;
o Improving the Experience-based norms;
o Securing the Normative expectations;
o Never going lower than the Minimum tolerable expectations;
 Establish corporate dress code and set up certain requirements on appearance for people dealing with the
customers in person. They need to be clean, well-groomed and mildly deodorized;
 Emphasize your standing behind the products and services you sell. Give a refund guarantee to the
customers, and provide them with a wide spectrum of free follow-up services to minimize probability of
requesting a refund (just make sure the product really works for their needs);
 Maintain toll free phone support line for customers and advertise its number proactively (in your
advertisements, on the web-site, in business cards, etc). Make sure you have enough of standby operators
to handle your daily average number of calls without missing a few or putting callers on hold;
 Ensure that representatives of Customer Service are completely authorized to answer the most of typical
issues and customer inquiries with minimum of escalations to a supervisor. A problem or a customer’s
claim should be escalated rarely, only in some outstanding cases, while the most of necessary
information, leverages, and tools should be effectively wielded by the staff;
 Train and develop the employee skills which are important to quality of Customer Service. Also you
need to include requirements on recruiting workers with appropriate potential at the level of staff
selection (for example you may need tranquil people, with clear and literate speech);
 If a customer request is put on hold, then you need to keep the customer in touch with its status, even if
no progress is made yet (use email, phone calls, or whatever appropriate);
 Aspire to minimize use of answering machines and on-line forms, but rather provide customers with
more possibilities to speak with a live person;