Corporate Social Responsibility or Profits: The Debate
In recent years, CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility has become the latest buzzword among the companies. This refers to the practice of the corporates in “giving back” to society in the form of programs that benefit the less privileged members of society. They can take the form of outreach programs that adopt schools; communities etc […]
Market Research Focus Groups
Focus groups are also known as group interviews or group discussions. They are used to understand the attitude or behaviour of the audience. Six to twelve individuals are selected and either one or two moderators (those who lead the discussions) are selected. If there are two moderators, they will adopt opposite positions. It is the […]
Choosing Brand Elements to Build Brand Equity
Brand equity is the result of a process which leads to a creation of a unique and distinct brand identity. These brand identifiers are referred to as brand identifiers. Brand identification can be done through various ways; for example, Unique Selling Proposition (USP), Logo, Style, Brand Ambassador, Etc. Brand elements facilitate the process of consumer […]
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and HR
Human Resources are those constituents of an organization that take care of the human facets and needs of all employees within that organization. Key functions of HR in an organization are- Employee recruitment and selection. Compensation calculation and reward program management. In-house training for all employees according to skill sets. Performance calculation and managing employee […]
Planograms – Meaning, its Need and Types of Product Placements
How do you think buildings are constructed? With the help of architectural drawings. An architectural drawing creates a rough print of the building on paper which gives an idea about the floor plans, location of rooms, lobby and so on. In retail a planogram replaces architectural drawings. Once a retailer opens a store, he needs […]
After having attained the desired service level, the next great challenge faced by service providers is to maintain service standards at levels of excellence. This is as important, and as tough, as establishing service standards and attaining to them in the first place.
There are basically two approaches that any organization can have towards maintaining service standards - a proactive approach or a reactive approach.
Proactive: A proactive approach entails actively reaching out to customers and trying to gather their feedback on service quality and suggested areas of improvement. This can be done by way of
Reactive: A reactive approach basically consists of resorting to a predetermined service recovery mechanism once a customer complains about poor service quality. It usually starts with apologizing to the customer and then taking steps to redeem the situation. The fundamental flaw with this approach is that, here the customer has already had a bad experience of the brand’s service.
Another crucial element to be kept in mind while seeking to maintain service quality is to have in place a metric for ‘measuring’ quality. The particular parameters selected would depend on the type of business, service model and the customer expectations. For example: at a customer service call center of a telecom provider, the metric for measuring service quality could be the average time taken for handling a call or rectifying a complaint. For a fast food outlet, the metrics for measuring service quality of the sales staff could be the number of bills generated as a percentage of total customer footfalls or the increase in sales month on month.
Once a system is put in place for measuring quality, a standard can then be mandated for the service standard the organization is seeking to maintain.
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