How to Rate a Business' Customer Service

by Malik Sharrieff

No matter what type of business you run or what industry you are in, you will have to provide your customers with some form of service. Even if all you do is sell standardized widgets to a relatively small market niche, that market will demand a certain level of customer service. So, as a business leader, you need to understand how to rate your business’ customer service. It is only by accurately measuring the effectiveness of your business’s customer service can you determine whether you are servicing your customer’s needs and how you can improve.

1. Analyze your target consumer to deduce their service needs. For example, your typical customer may need questions answered about product usage in very short order, translation of technical instructions, or consideration for emotional concerns that may affect their purchase decision. Once you have defined what your target customer needs most, you can use this as the basis to measure how well you service these needs.

2. Outline those areas where your business’s representatives can perform to address customer service needs. For example, average talk-time, average hold-time, courtesy and understanding, or product knowledge and communication skills.

3. Ensure that the areas you’ve outlined in Step 2 are in line with the company’s business goals and objectives. Not only will you need to service the customer’s needs, but you will need to be certain that providing good customer service won’t significantly reduce profitability. If you find that this is the case, you may need to redefine your target consumer.

4. Define specific action steps--also known as performance indicators--your representatives should accomplish during every customer interaction. This could be as simple as confirming an understanding of the customer’s concern or forwarding the customer more understandable instructions to address a technical concern.

5. Implement the necessary technology to integrate the systems that measure customer service with those used to provide that service. Critical data will inevitably be lost or corrupted if you require aspects of your service measurement to be manually recorded by the representatives being measured.


  • During the planning of your customer service rating system, don’t forget to include the input of your customer service representatives. Because these will be the individuals serving as the customer’s initial point of contact with your company, they will have the greatest insight into what service your customer’s need most.

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