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Establishing A Customer Service Baseline and Tracking Program

If your company is serious about improving customer service satisfaction over time, it must establish both a customer service baseline and a customer service tracking program.

Successful customer service baseline and customer service tracking programs require well-designed surveys.

The first step in your customer service research is to conduct customer service baseline surveys to establish how your company is currently performing on the issues most important to your customers. You then can take initiatives toward improving customer service and measure the effect with customer service tracking surveys.

At Polaris, we can either create a new customer service survey program for your company or refresh an ongoing survey program. Based on our years of experience and the specific needs of your company, we will make recommendations on survey design, interview numbers and frequency tracking for your customer service baseline surveys and customer service tracking surveys. Whether your goal is improving customer service or preventing the decline of current service levels, Polaris can produce a performance measurement program that makes your customer service surveys efficient tools for evaluation.

Improving Customer Service with Baseline and Tracking Surveys

In the quest to improve customer service within your company, designing a performance measurement program around your customer service baseline surveys and customer service tracking surveys can be complicated. One of the first decisions that needs to be made, and a decision with the highest impact on price, is the appropriate sample size for establishing a reliable performance measurement. When deciding sample size for your customer service surveys, these are good questions to ask:

• How is the performance measurement program to be used?
  • Is it to diagnose problems, maintain performance or improve performance?
  • Will it be used to support performance-based improvement incentives?
• How timely does the information need to be?
• Immediate: daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly?
• Less immediate: quarterly, semi-annually, or annually?
• What is the positive relationship between cost and survey volume?
• How many separate entities (locations) are there for “drill-down” purposes? Are decisions being made by each entity or can they be rolled up (see chart below)?
• Does the methodology fulfill the objectives within the available budget?
• What impact do respondent incentives have on the budget and what incentives are most effective in increasing response rate?

Where significant budget constraints exist, data can be collected continuously but reported less frequently to increase statistical reliability (see sample table below). If, for example, you execute 50 surveys per location per month and you report on a monthly basis, the margin of error would be +/- 13.9%. If you gathered results continuously but reported on a less frequent semi-annual basis, the margin of error would be a more acceptable +/- 5.7%. Polaris can help you decide which option is best for you based upon your specific needs.

Monthly Margin Of Error At 95% Confidence Level Chart (Infinite Population)

	25/entity/mo.	50/entity/mo.	75/entity/mo.	100/entity/mo.
Monthly Reporting	+/- 19.6% (25)	+/- 13.9% (50)	+/- 11.3% (75)	+/- 9.8% (100)
Bimonthly Reporting	+/- 13.9% (50)	+/- 9.8% (100)	+/- 8.0% (150)	+/- 6.9% (200)
Quarterly Reporting	+/- 11.3% (75)	+/- 8.0% (150)	+/- 6.5% (225)	+/- 5.7% (300)
Semiannual Reporting	+/- 8.0% (150)	+/- 5.7% (300)	+/- 4.6 (450)	+/- 4.0 (600)
Annual Reporting	+/- 5.7% (300)	+/- 4.0% (600)	+/- 3.3% (900)	+/- 2.8% (1200)

Contact us to learn more about customer service baseline and customer service tracking surveys.