Auditing your customer service activities

Abstract Buyers are demanding a higher quality of customer service to accompany their purchases. Marketers, to remain competitive, must carefully analyze their customer service offerings to determine whether the services are truly meeting the needs of customers. A taxonomy of customer service is offered which will provide greater structure to an audit of a firm's customer service. The components of customer service which are analyzed in this article are: communications, uniformity of quality, simplicity, truthfulness/accuracy of information, objectives, monitoring the program, economics, and intradepartmental relations. Questions are posed which a manager could use to audit each component of a customer service program.