Taking Stock Service Appraisers Help Businesses To Improve Customer Satisfaction

For a lot of businesses, service is a tennis term.

Firms that provide customer-service research say that many businesses need to take a harder, smarter look at how they treat customers. Too much is taken for granted, experts say.

A growing number of firms are trying to help businesses detect and overcome poor service. They survey customers. They help make sense of comment cards. They even send mystery shoppers to client stores for first-hand reports.

“Our business is helping our customers keep their customers,” said Ingrid Hanou, director of the hospitality group at Seattle-based Service Intelligence Inc.

What most customers want, researchers say, is a certain amount of respect and attention.

“Sometimes in a mall, for example, it’s even being acknowledged that you’re there,” said Nancy Carlsen, president and co-founder of Bellevue-based Consumer Critique Customer Service.

Sales clerks who ignore customers turn potential buyers away, Carlsen said. “Personal service is something everybody wants to have.”

Satisfied customers aren’t always happy customers, researchers say.

“The things that make customers most satisfied are not always the things that will make them loyal,” said Tim Kula, director of customer satisfaction at Gilmore Research in Seattle.

Customers want something to be fixed right the first time, for example, Kula said. But attitude - the feeling they are important to the business - keeps them coming back.

“The current hot thing in customer satisfaction is not what makes you satisfied anymore, it’s what will surprise and delight you,” he said. Consumers have too many choices in big cities to settle for just OK.

Hanou of Service Intelligence said it is important to recognize that different customers have different needs. A bank, for example, will have to satisfy “convenience customers” who want to get in and out as quickly as possible. But it also must satisfy “teller customers” who want face-to-face contact and conversation.

“You can’t treat all of your customer groups the same,” she said.

Service Intelligence apparently is a hit with its customers.

In four years, the firm has grown to $2 million in annual sales, with a nationwide list of customers that ranges from Starbucks and Ivar’s to Westin Hotels, Cinnabon and several large banks in the eastern United States.

The company was formed by three partners, Lisa Goodman, Susan Smith and Peter Gurney, who drifted together in Seattle with a diverse background in research, service and marketing.

“The research that companies were getting was too voluminous and difficult to read,” said Goodman, director of marketing. “There was no analysis, just data.”

Smith, the company vice president, said they try to target programs to customers’ specific needs.

Does the company’s telephone tree make it easy to get through to someone? Do company rules actually prevent employees from providing good service? Are female or minority customers treated differently than other customers? What do a company’s top salespeople do that can be emulated by other employees?

For Starbucks, Service Intelligence compiles information and makes reports based on customer comment cards and mystery shoppers at outlets nationwide.

“We really need to listen to our customers,” said Starbucks spokeswoman Jeannie McKay. “They give us a way to manage that important information and put it to the best possible use.”

When customers have complaints, they frequently just want to be recognized, Hanou said. Unhappy customers tend to tell a lot of their friends.

Mystery shopping gives clients first-hand information on what it’s like to shop at their own stores.

“It gives them feedback on what’s actually happening and how customers feel,” said Carlsen of Consumer Critique.

Mystery shoppers show up unannounced, testing the way a company treats its customers from start to finish. They look like the real thing - tell-tale signals like note-taking and discussing why they’re there are forbidden while on the job.

“We rarely get discovered,” Hanou said.

For Ivar’s, Service Intelligence developed a 15-page questionnaire, which mystery shoppers fill out after their visit to one of Ivar’s three full-service restaurants. Questions range from the appearance of the restrooms to whether waiters remembered to talk about the day’s specials. Shoppers are encouraged to give their own impressions of the restaurant.

“The idea is to have their shoppers go out and give us a customer’s-eye view of what goes on in our restaurants,” said Stephanie Kleinman, Ivar’s assistant director of operations. It’s a task Ivar’s can’t do for itself - company executives would be too obvious, Kleinman said.

Service Intelligence’s mystery shoppers visit each of the Ivar’s once a month for lunch and dinner. No individual mystery shopper ever visits a restaurant more than once.

Service Intelligence gathers the information and makes regular, quick reports to Ivar’s. Kleinman said it has helped Ivar’s improve the restaurants’ results over the last two years. Waiters, for example, need to be salesmen, as most customers want to know about specials and what’s in them.

“We try to use them in a constructive way to give people pointers,” Kleinman said of the Service Intelligence reports. “We don’t use them as a stick.”

Service Intelligence has turned down business from firms that wanted to use such information to decide who to lay off, Hanou said.

Carlsen said learning to cross-sell is an important skill for salespeople. “That’s really helping the customer,” she said.

For example, a gift-buying shopper may appreciate being reminded of what else they might need - gift wrap, tape, ribbon, a card.

“It’s not being pushy, it’s being helpful,” Carlsen said. “Most people really just want to be helped in a sincere manner.”