The Successful CXO
Committed to Customer Service

Every business person knows customers are a necessity to your success. They’re going to become more and more prevalent in business decisions as well—or at least they should. Through social media, customers have a significantly higher chance of making a very public complaint and or complaining straight to the businesses CEO or President (since all execs should have social media-it's easier to complain to them)  It’s great to hear clients feedback no matter how it comes through (email, twitter, facebook, phone call). What do you do though when they complain or make a suggestion? Maybe they think you need to make an adjustment to a specific product, how do you know if other clients feel the same way so you can act on this idea? You let them vote.  

There are many different trends popping up for customer relationship management now and will trend throughout 2012 until the next big thing comes along. Here are just a few things to look out for and get on top of before you’re so far behind no one will see you as relevant.

Multilevel SLA: This SLA is fairly self-explanatory.  It is when the SLA is split into different levels.  The levels address different sets of your customers for the same services.  This eliminates having more SLA’s than necessary and, to me, seems to prevent clutter.

What exactly is a “Service Level Agreement (SLA)”?  Business Dictionary defines SLA as a “contract between a service provider and a customer, it details the nature, quality, and scope of the service to be provided.” 

When creating and implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA), there are different metrics used to measure your effectiveness. Here are four popular ones used today:

Every SLA is made up of certain, key components. It may vary depending on the company or specific SLA but there are some basics that you should consider for each individual Service Level Agreement.  

Making Sense of the Chaos:
Now that you have your customers’ feedback and your agent has received the feedback, what do you do?

In the last CXO blog, I talked about capturing customer feedback. If you want to improve your business to meet customer needs and wants, you must capture feedback and find out what they want.  Now, what do you do when consumers are giving their feedback?

Step 2- Monitor feedback.
There needs to be a moderator for your feedback outlet, such as a forum.  People are able to say whatever they want whenever.  If there is someone on a forum or poll who adamantly disagrees with you or another customer, they may harass whomever they disagree with.  That will clearly discourage others from commenting or giving their feedback on future forums. 

Part 1 of 3
Step 1: Capture Feedback - Every company needs to have some way of capturing feedback from their customers. There are plenty of different ways to receive useful feedback from your customers.  There are many different ways to gather direct feedback; Phone, Email, Forums, Surveys, Polls to name a few.

I don't know about your newspaper, but mine seems full of bad news today. Housing prices are sinking, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas says the economy is near stall speed, and Reddy Ice Holdings is in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.