The speed of electronic communications allowed for surveys to be conducted within 48 hours of the service being performed. Even better, any negative responses are probed by the interviewers. These customer comments are transmitted to the appropriate unit manager each night. Positive comments that are volunteered by the customer are also captured and sent to the managers nightly. These verbatims provide unit managers with daily coaching tools as well as opportunities to give individuals public pats on the back for positive customer feedback.
Managers categorize customer comments by individual, by day of service and by type of service.
A look at how customer comments cluster over a 4 to 12 week period provides a good idea of what areas represent opportunities for improvement by the unit as a whole or for an individual. Working with the client's Information Systems people, we were able to integrate the survey data with data collected in other parts of the client's organization to provide a more complete service scorecard that can be viewed electronically daily. They can quickly tell whether their scores are moving in the right direction. In addition, the daily verbatims tell them what is going wrong when there is a service failure. Each comment is accompanied with the customer's name, phone number, type of service and date of service allowing managers the ability to quickly move toward service recovery when appropriate.