Why did you wish to achieve the Customer Service Excellence Standard?
We have always believed that our high standards of customer service are a key driver of business performance and so wanted an effective way of demonstrating and displaying this. We’d become disillusioned by the “awards” industry, which has become increasingly commercialised and superficial. We didn’t want to play that game anymore.
When we found Customer Service Excellence, we were initially attracted by the authenticity and credibility provided by genuine independent assessment. However, on further investigation, we realised that the framework and assessment process could also provide us with a structured approach to consider our ways of working, to take an honest look at ourselves, to generate new ideas and to set clear strategy and actions for improvement.
What was your approach to assessment?
Customer service is the responsibility of all team members. So, we wanted to ensure that everyone was involved. Being able to share their observations, opinions and ideas is essential for gaining commitment to change – and improvement is all about change.
There are a lot of elements to the standard. This could easily have been overwhelming without a structured approach. Assessment Services Self-Assessment Tool was essential for helping us identify how to tackle the challenge.
We downloaded the offline version of the Self-Assessment Tool and shared an individual version with each team member. Over the next two weeks, each person conducted their own assessment across as many points as they could and then collated this to one master document. It was really interesting to take on all the different perspectives and this helped us identify our strengths, the best sources of evidence for these, and identifying where we could improve. We then discussed the results with all team members contributing ideas on how we could move forward.
What have you experienced as the impact/benefit of the CSE Standard?
The approach that we took has led to numerous mini-projects and actions – we were already good, but we’ve got even better over the past 6 months and are confident that we have a direction where we will continue to improve.
Simple changes mean that we are more in touch with our customers interests and challenges than ever before. We’ve made numerous simple improvements, some of which should have been obvious. Taking time to rate yourself on specific points and facing-up to the impact of any shortcomings on customers has proven to be a powerful catalyst for taking action.
Our team are also much more vocal about their observations and opinions now, more willing to share their ideas than ever before. That will help us achieve continual improvement.
How did the assessment feedback support you?
Graham, our assessor, was a pleasure to work with – genuinely interested, challenging and supportive.
It’s so easy to get used to the way things are. So, it was really important to hear his observations of our key strengths and the impact of our unique initiatives. This reminded us why we do these things, that we must continue to do them and to build on them.
It was equally important to hear those Areas for Continuous Improvement. Independent assessment has raised a some questions for us about the way we do some things and increased our awareness of what other organisations do. We can’t change everything all at once – we’ve implemented a lot of change and reinforced ways over working over the past six months. So, we’re going to sit down as a team again and work together to consider the improvement opportunities and how we can convert them to practical actions.
Why did you choose Assessment Services Ltd for your assessment?
We chose Assessment Services for a number of reasons: your willingness to have honest open discussion about the process; challenges and benefits of achieving the Customer Service Excellence Standard; the opportunity to have a discussion with an Assessor; and the Self-Assessment Tool as a practical tool to help us identify, collate and submit evidence for the Standard.
