Maintain Customer Service Scores

As you research your customer service satisfaction scores, you're going to find that even in a perfect scenario, you're likely to see a plateau effect, where no matter how hard you try you cannot seem to get the scores to be any higher. Recently we wrote an article about why this may occur, entitled "Universally vs. Subjectively "Bad" Customer Service." The idea is that there is no such thing as perfect customer service because people see the way they're provided service differently.

In addition, there is a limit to how likely it is that every employee you have delivers excellent customer service 100% of the time. If you work on customer service, it's likely that your company is going to plateau. Once you plateau the natural reaction is to keep your customer service as is.

Instead, however, you may want to continue to improve your customer service in order to maintain your scores.

Maintaining high customer satisfaction scores can often be a difficult process, and one that you should greet with joy rather than with indifference. Consider all of the following: Habituation – Customers are eventually going to get used to the ways you have presented customer service to them. When customers get used to that level of customer service, it's possible that the scores will dip slightly, indicating that the novelty of your customer service efforts has worn off.

Complacency – Employees are prone to this same type of problem. Once customer service is at its peak, without changes it's not unlikely for employees to start to lax their customer service efforts as they get arguably too used to performing the same behaviors. Competition – While your company remains the same, other companies are going to try to improve their own customer service, and the less your customer service differs from your competition the more it becomes comparatively unremarkable.

All of these can affect how easy it is to maintain high customer service scores for an extended period of time without continuing to make changes.

Continuing to try to "perfect" your customer service also shows the organization that it needs to continue to be customer focused – a strength that will affect every aspect of your business. Maintaining a high customer service score is difficult. If you're able to maintain a high customer service score for an extended period of time, you should consider that a great accomplishment.