Six years ago, Freeman began surveying every customer on every event to benchmark how customers rated our services and their overall experience of doing business with us. From the responses, a Customer Service Index (internally we call it CSI as we always come up with an acronym for everything!), was determined for each event, both trade shows and conventions where we served as a general service contractor (another acronymJ) as well as corporate events. In addition, each branch was also scored based upon the events they were responsible for producing.
The first year this process was implemented, we scored an average CSI of 71 for all events. Good, but certainly not great.
In the second year, we had spent more time and effort trying to get everyone on board. As more people became aware that their events were being rated in this way, there was some improvement. Our average CSI score increased almost 6% to 75. Again, this was good, but not great.
Going into the third year, we made a significant change that charted a course that has lead our average CSI scores for all events to surge over the past 3 years a whopping 21% to 91.
These improvements lead to our inclusion in some leading books that have been written on customer service excellence (Customer Loyalty Guaranteed and Take Their Breath Away). We were even featured in Customer Service Excellence, a publication of the Customer Service Institute of America. Topping it all off, we became the first trade show general service contractor or vendor in history to be nominated and won the prestigious International Customer Service Award, along with Bath and Body Works, Nokia, Jet Blue, Baxter Medical Healthcare and Zappos.com. This award is given annually to companies who exemplify customer service excellence.
This makes for a great story. However, what is important is how we were able to get everyone on board to support this important initiative.
We realized that if we were going to significantly improve the amount of effort each person in each department and each branch expended to improve customer service, then the best way to accomplish this was to base everyone’s compensation, in part, on their events’ CSI scores.
