Customer Care Management - Report Example

care project Aim: Taking accountability for driving No1 for care in the store by reviewing care measurement (CCM) report and taking the steps required to improve the customer care teams. Introduction Customer service means serving the customers and involves all contact with customer either directly or indirectly. Customer care is at the heart of all retail activity of a firm. In a highly competitive industry, it is perceived to be the single most important factor that influences people’s choice between one outlet and another. Good customer service is all about bringing customers back, and sending them away happy enough to pass positive feedback about Boots business along to others, who may then try the products or services offered by Boots for themselves and eventually, become repeat customers. Where staff members are well trained to provide good customer service, they can sell anything to anyone. However, it is the staff members’ approach to customer service that determines whether or not they are able to sell anything to a particular customer. The essence of good customer service is forming a good relationship with customers, a relationship that an individual customer feels is important and good enough to pursue. Traditionally, many businesses including Boots used to measure customer satisfaction using mystery shoppers, today however it’s left to the public or customers themselves to evaluate a company’s quality of customer service. This is done through online and telephone surveys where customers are asked to either strongly agree 100% satisfaction, agree, neither agree/nor disagree and strongly disagree. This project was conducted for four weeks and the aim was to gather information and monitor the progress of customer feedback and analyse the results. There are 17 stores in West Kent and Medway area, the ranking of the score shows which store delivered the highest quality customer service as per the interviewed customers. Gathering customer care measurement and interpreting scores The customer care measurement (CCM) score report or feel good moment, was printed weekly from Boots online web, starting from week 41 date 12/01/2013 and ending on week 44 date 02/02/2013. During week 41, on average, 19 customers responded to the survey with overall satisfaction of 43.9% and this was ranked as position 16. During the week most of the customer agreed that customer care was good instead of strongly agreeing. This is the main reason the result dropped to 43.9%. Preparation started to get higher during week 42. In week 42 on average, 24 customers responded to the survey with overall satisfaction of 66.7% and this was ranked as position 7. During the week, the number of responses increased with a higher number of customers strongly agreeing hence the results of overall satisfaction increased to 66.7%. However, the target had not been met still. In week 43, on average, 25 customers responded to the survey with overall satisfaction of 57.3% and this was ranked as position 11. During the week, the number of responses increased by 1 from the previous week, but the number of customers who strongly agreed decreased thereby decreasing the overall customer satisfaction by -9.4%. In week 44, on average, 30 customers responded to the survey with overall satisfaction of 63.3% and this was ranked as position 10. During this week, the number of responses increased by 5 from the previous week. Customers who selected the strongly agree option increased hence, the overall customer satisfaction increased by 6% from the previous week. Very few customers selected the agree option and during the entire duration of data collection no customer selected the strongly disagree option. Observation The health care team who provide customer service were issued with survey questionnaires with their names printed on them. This was done in order to find out the response rate but the method failed work well because most of the staff members forgot to fill in the questionnaires as they were busy with customers. Personal observation and feedback from customers shows that the number of responses co-related with the character of health care staff members towards the customers. This influenced the responses of customers where responses were very helpful, happy and cheerful attitude, very friendly, very polite, and quick service. All the above staff attitudes influenced the likelihood of customers to give positive responses such as agree and strongly agree responses. The was associated with the fact that most of the health care staff members were very experienced in delivering great customer service. Formulated and carry out your action plan. The plan started a week earlier in order to inform and prepare the staff members to attain the target. A total of 8 staff members participated in the project, 4 from the health care department and 4 from the dispensary department. Every day, 38 customer survey questionnaires were printed for each department and therefore a total of 76 questionnaires were distributed to customers every day. The target were at least 25% responses as it was assumed that elderly people would not able to call or use emails and customers who were not interested in participating in the survey were also taken in to consideration because they directly affected the results of the study. Staff members were given training about flue products and flue vaccination service and how to communicate and deliver complete customer care. For instance, a patient who comes to the store to buy a cough product could be given a product such as guafesin for the main symptom and vitamin C for preventative purposes and provided with full information about flu jab vaccination service and issued with a hand leaflet. In week one when the customer response was so low with overall satisfaction of 43.9%, extra training was provided in order to help meet the target This was discussed as follows, Phone calls: Receiving calls from customers is very important, when there is a call from a customer, there must be someone to answer. Most customers prefer live person communication rather than robot or answering machines. Promises: Avoid giving unrealistic promises because this may affect the relationship with the customer. Promises such as the date that a patient’s medication will arrive from surgery, assuring that medication will help patient to cure the symptom or patient medication will be delivered to their home on a particular date are all likely to affect the relationship negatively if they are not kept. Complaints: No one wants to listen to complaints; it is impossible please all the people or all the time. However, if you give attention to complaints, you may be able to please this particular person at this one time. Being helpful even though there is no profit in it, such as when people come with inhalers to request for help on how to use them. Even though they bring the inhaler from a different chemist, they should be helped without charging them. Taking extra step: When a customer walks in to the store and asks where to find a particular item, it is important to lead the customer to the aisle rather than telling them “it’s in aisle 2”. Customers may not ask you to take them to aisle 2 but they may notice that you are taking extra effort to help them and they may tell to other people about it. Giving extra information: When customers enquire about coupons, discount cards or points, it is important to offer extra information on how to use these coupons and also to smile at them. This will help guarantee their satisfaction with the service. People love to get something more than they expected. Maintain Engagement throughout period The staff members were required to deliver good customer service and to be able to finish the daily printed survey throughout the four weeks project time. The number of weekly responses and overall customer satisfaction increased from week to week. This shows that staff members worked hard to deliver good customer service. Monitoring success Customer service plays a very important role in guaranteeing profitability firms including Boots. Winning and maintaining customers is one of the main aims of the customer service. Boots often spends a lot of time and money to ensure good customer service. Sales teams, marketing, advertising, promotions and sponsorships to keep customers all cost money, and if a customer decides to take their business elsewhere, then this money will have been wasted. Happy customers tend to return to buy more products or services from Boots. These can be monitored by observing the number of daily sales of products, the number of positive customer feedbacks and the number of responses with strongly agree. I know these verges on the kind of statement thats often seen on a sampler, but providing good customer service is a simple thing. If you truly want to have good customer service, all you have to do is ensure that your business consistently does certain things as discussed above. Conclusion In the four weeks customer care measurement project, the aim was to get 25% response rate on the total daily distributed survey questionnaires which translates to 19 responses daily but this target not met. The highest response rate for all the weeks was 30 questionnaires, but there was progress from week 1 to week 4. Some of the reasons the target was not met were that most of customer do not like to participate in surveys and that most did not believe that there was a £200 worth of advantage card to be won. This is because they had never seen or heard anyone who had won. According to my observation, customers would have wanted to see or hear that somebody had won the £200 worthy of advantage card. Some customers responded by saying that they had tried many times but had won nothing therefore they did not see any reason to waste their time on the survey. Another reason for not meeting the target was that people such as the elderly did not have access to the internet or mobile phones. Others were busy spending the whole day at work therefore they did not bother to participate. Another reason that was mentioned was the fact that the code on the survey expired within 3 days giving less time to people to respond. Read More