Customer service has become increasingly important as e-commerce booms and businesses compete to gain and retain customers. Unless you provide customers with the service they expect, it is easy for them to simply go elsewhere and they may even spread the word on social media about their negative experience with your company.

When resources are disorganized, systems are inefficient and customer service team members are poorly trained, it is easy for customer service problems to occur. Using the principles of Six Sigma can help you to evaluate and optimize your customer service delivery.

Define customer service

Every customer complaint should be seen as a chance to learn about which processes you can improve. Six Sigma courses offered by 6Sigma.com offer a data-driven methodology to improve customer service processes. DMAIC helps to define and measure a problem throughout solution implementation and establishing practices to control and maintain the solutions.

Before fixing a problem, it is important to clearly understand it. You need to be clear about what is happening and why it is happening. One common problem customers often complain about is not receiving a product on the promised delivery date. It is possible to use the Six Sigma methodology to address customer complaints like this and many others.

Measure customer service 

Once you understand a particular customer service issue, such as not receiving a quick response to complaints or being passed to person after person to solve an issue, you can begin to outline all the details and variables associated with the problem and gather all the evidence. In this phase, you basically confirm your current baseline operations by accumulating data.

The data may reveal various problems, such as that employee turnover is high or that employees do not receive enough training to lead to the positive customer interactions that are necessary to create customer loyalty.

Analyze customer service

Analyzing the root causes of why the problem occurs is possible once you have gathered all the data. You can identify whether customer complaints can be traced back to a specific department or even to a specific employee. Perhaps complaints are typically associated with one of your products or offers.

Maybe most customer complaints are a result of inadequate staff training and more staff training could provide a way to help to solve the problem. Inefficiencies, poor practices and wastage could all affect customer experience. You could be getting certain things right and still lose revenue for these reasons.

Improve customer service

Finally, you can look at a solution to the problem. What steps can you take to resolve the problem? What changes need to be made to ensure this, and who will implement them and communicate them? What daily customer service tasks could be improved to increase efficiency?

For instance, focusing on improving the customer complaint management system could mean increasing communications between problem-solving teams, reducing waste in the reporting system and increasing the quality of investigations. The goal would be to keep customers informed by providing speedy feedback and offering reliable information.

Control customer service

If you want to keep improving your customer service, you need to create controls to ensure this. Six Sigma can clarify the roles of each person involved in the customer complaints process and save costs by the reduction of complaints. It can change what employees do and put a major emphasis on tying process improvements to customer needs.

Seeing customer conversions increasing and more customer loyalty and retention is a sign that the improvements you made are working. This sets a standard for future customer interactions and ensures you keep delivering the best customer service.