In this excellent article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, customer service expert John Tschohl points out that every company should think of themselves as a customer service company, not a retail or manufacturing company. That means that everything that company does has to be geared toward making the customer experience better and better.  Included in ways to do that are making sure you understand the policies, procedures and systems you have in place that contribute to the customer experience and making sure they are top notch. An extremely important element is your employees. All employee hires should be made from the cream of the crop, not settling for less. Finally, those employees have to be educated and trained continuously.

The services of a mystery shopping firm can help most businesses get a handle on what customers are experiencing and whether employees are following through with what they’ve trained to do.

And, a business can’t succeed at all unless they have some measurement tools in place. Mystery shopping and customer [J8]service evaluations are one way to obtain benchmarks and measurement tools.