What is the most effective way to evaluate the quality of your product or service to your internal external customer?

The key steps to quality monitoring that will ensure your organisation's customer service remains competitive.

In today’s competitive environment, the quality of your customer service is an increasingly important factor in nurturing positive customer loyalty. However, it remains the case that many organisations are still not monitoring, measuring or even managing the service quality of their contact centre agents, despite the fact that a single interaction between them and the customer can make or break a relationship.

Verint recently carried out some research looking at the state of customer service in the UK. It found that despite the current economic climate, only 22% of consumers value price over service and as many as 38% of consumers admit to never contacting their suppliers, and those that do don’t get in touch very often. How can you build customer relationships and create a loyal customer base if this is the case?

Organisations need to ensure that the few interactions a customer has with the contact centre are handled efficiently and leave the customer feeling satisfied.

Making quality the ‘norm’

While the customer’s personal experience cannot always be completely captured and analysed, this information - call recordings in contact centres, customer emails and social media interactions - combined with customer satisfaction surveys, can give an organisation a better idea of the customer experience. These insights will allow companies to improve their service and tailor their products precisely to what their customers want, improving satisfaction and increasing loyalty.

Unfortunately, the reality for many organisations is slightly different, and organisations often struggle to manage the basic call monitoring functions, or capture additional insight from other channels such as email, instant messaging or social networking sites. Too often the focus is put on streamlining internal efficiency-based metrics, meeting tightly monitored call routing and time SLAs, while the detailed assessment of the customer experience and the outcome of the call are put to one side.

By treating calls as one-off customer issues, the contact centre is at risk of ignoring the underlying commonalties and actually being able to identify the root-cause and possible prevention for these situations. Fundamentally, though, this can all act towards improving the customer service.

What needs to change?

The key to effective quality monitoring includes six crucial steps:

1. Listen to your customers by monitoring interactions. Ask questions such as: are these interactions related to the company’s goals and objectives, or are they related to specific areas of concern such as customer attrition? This is where analytics comes into play for the contact centre. Speech analytics identifies calls that are relevant for evaluation and text analytics identifies email and chat interactions that should be monitored.

2. Capture all of your customer feedback channels. Apply the same quality standard that is used for calls to text-based interactions like email and chat.

3. Ask your customer what they think. Instead of using your organisation’s internal metrics to measure the quality of a call, ask the customer: “What did you think of your experience and the agent you worked with?” or “Did your service experience match the promise made in our advertising?” It’s very important to map high-quality interactions with your customers’ expectations, comparing internal evaluation scores with customer scores.

4. Use quality monitoring to help agents improve skills. Evaluate interactions to identify skills gaps, and provide individual learning opportunities where there are deficiencies.

5. Do not view agent development as a one-off activity. Provide continuous coaching that will help improve agent performance and productivity. Coaching is key to consistent customer service.

6. Measure your results and keep track of continuous feedback and evaluation to monitor and measure progress.

Remaining competitive

By monitoring quality across multiple channels, organisations can learn from their customer interactions, leading to better decision making, service and processes. The monitoring, measuring and managing of performance and service quality must remain a priority, but the “voice of the customer” analytics, across multiple channels, is just as important.

By adopting the view that quality monitoring is a strategic process rather than a tactical one, companies will begin to see an improvement of their customers experience and their customers therefore becoming their strongest champions.

Steve Rosier is director of voice of the customer analytics at Verint.

We’re all pretty clear on what a customer is, but sometimes it helps to clarify the overarching definition, especially as thinking evolves around providing a great customer experience to external and internal customers who might define experience in completely different terms. So, let’s explore the differences between external and internal customers.

• From an IT perspective, it’s often helpful to separate the types of customers you serve: you may have a help desk and a service desk, or maybe a service desk that serves both internal employees and public customers.
• From a customer service perspective, understanding the needs of your customers can help you clarify workflows and decide whether your company should distinguish between internal and external customers.

What is an external customer?

External customers are the people that pay for and use the products or services your company offers. When brainstorming problems and designing solutions, these customers are who you’re designing for.

To be clear, an external customer is a person who is not directly connected to your organization other than by purchasing your product or service. This customer could be a one-time purchaser or a person who’ve you worked with long-term and to whom you’ve provided add-ons or customization options. External customers are also known as “clients” or “accounts.”

The goals for your external customer can depend on your product or service, i.e., repeat purchasing, referrals, positive reviews, and otherwise supporting your company. You might follow up after-purchase—or during—to conduct formal or quick-pulse surveys. “The customer is always right” is generally the guiding principle when serving this group, and the revenue they generate is the lifeblood of your company. Without them, your company fails.

What is an internal customer?

Internal customers have a relationship with, and within, your company, either through employment or as partners who deliver your product or service to the end user, the external customer. Less obvious but certainly still significant, stakeholders and shareholders are also internal customers. All of these may or may not purchase your product or service.

Comparing internal and external customers

External customers have been inherent in business since people started making and selling products—a long time! The idea of an internal customer, however, is a more modern one. For instance, Six Sigma encourages identifying internal customers as a way of creating a more positive work environment.

That positive work environment includes things like kind and empathetic leadership, fair and equitable pay, comfortable working conditions, the latest technology, and so on. The thinking goes: the higher employee morale, the more those employees work with integrity and productivity. That morale can also come from the idea that they are contributing to something larger, which ripples out positively to improve how they work. One school of thought connects satisfied internal customers with happy external customers.

Beyond the feel-good psychology, though, using the term “internal customers” may have some tangible benefits. For teams who work with both internal and external customers, it can help them prioritize problems and timelines to improve inter-department communication. Treating everyone as a customer may also encourage employees to take each other just as seriously as they would take a referral or complaint from an external customer.

Do negative internal customer experiences affect external customers?

Once you determine that you’re going to address customers as internal and external, it’s easier to recognize how the former’s experience can affect the latter’s.

Case in point, if your internal customers have a role that faces external customers, such as in a call center, then it’s imperative that the systems those employees rely on for their jobs are resilient and function easily and effectively.

If outdated processes and antiquated tech frustrate your staff, that experience is likely replicated when your external customers seek assistance, so you get dual frustrations—not a great recipe for success. Delivering smooth, intuitive experiences for internal customers frees them to provide the same to your external customers.

Drawbacks of making each person a customer

Business experts and sociologists are aware of the inherent confusion in delineating internal and external customers. How do you apply “the customer is always right” to a coworker or colleague who isn’t on board with the new company philosophy or method?

The truth is you may not be able to, which is why some believe the term “internal customers” can dilute the urgency around external customers. This paradigm shift may actually promote more mediocre performance. If everyone is a customer, who is the most important? The answer should be the external customer.

CEOs find more success when they connect employees to external customers. It is more impactful to talk about how their product (medical devices, time management software, bicycle helmets, etc.) is valuable to the customers by saving their lives or improving their work than it is to compare how much money shareholders will get as a result.

Many employees in IT, customer service, and other customer-facing roles also support the “external customers only” mindset because it leads to better alignment across the organization. You’re all trying to serve the singular group of external customers, instead of the various internal clients that are spread across your company’s departments and related partners.

The Transcendent Customer Experience

One of the tenets of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, the Transcendent Customer Experience (TCE), weighs external and internal customers as equally important. And it sees the external customer experience (CX) and internal, or employee, experience (EX) evolving to a future-state that gives customers what they want, when and where they want it, quickly and seamlessly. In many ways, that future state has been significantly fast-tracked, and CX and EX have almost blurred into one.

With the 2020 global pandemic putting so many brick and mortar businesses and on-site work arrangements on pause, CX and EX are increasingly being done online from cell phones, tablets, laptops, and an array of devices. To address this, many retailers, businesses, and employers have had to nimbly pivot their thinking, and their systems, to catch up—whether that means supporting online ordering and contactless delivery or telemedicine, or helping staff set up high-speed internet, VPN, and conferencing tools to do their jobs at home.

Businesses that immediately shifted gears to adapt to these new processes have been able to keep their internal and external customers happy.

Driven by a marriage of data and journey analytics that anticipate and deliver proactive instead of reactive experiences, TCE ascribes to the idea of taking the experience to the customers—wherever they happen to be. Merging human elements with technology—specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—has enabled a new era of mobile-first and do-it-yourself solutions that empower external and internal customers to architect the services and solutions they need with a simple swipe or tap.

That newfound speed and convenience will no doubt have far-reaching implications for both internal and external customers as they chart a course toward the future.

Related reading

• BMC Business of IT Blog
• BMC Service Management Blog
• How To Create Transcendent Customer Experiences Driven By Data
• What is Employee Experience Management?
• What Is EXTech? The Newest Way to Improve the Employee Experience
• Using Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) as a Service Desk Metric

These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing .

How do you evaluate the quality of services?

How do you evaluate your customer service?

What is the best way to measure customer satisfaction?

What are three ways you might assess the effectiveness of customer service practices by examining overall business performance?