How To Conduct a Customer Service Self Evaluation For Vape Stores

It's often hard to grow what you can't measure. And one of the areas that might seem like it's hard to measure is customer service effectiveness. However, by conducting a customer service self-evaluation, you might get a peek at not only how your customers feel about their interactions with your employees but also how to improve those exchanges. But what is a customer service self-evaluation, and how can you conduct one? We will answer these and more questions in today's blog.

Table Of Contents

1. What Is a Customer Service Self-Evaluation?
2. Why is Customer Service Self-Evaluation Important?
3. Customer Service Self Evaluation Examples
4. How To Conduct a Customer Service Self-evaluation, Step by Step
5. Conclusion

What is a Customer Service Self-Evaluation?

A customer service self-evaluation is essential for any vape shop, whether it is a brick-and-mortar or eCommerce store. It is the perfect way to assess with data, customer feedback, and employee insight into treating your clients.

In the end, you should have an excellent customer service evaluation tool that helps you and your customer service representatives improve on areas that are lacking and create a road map for improvement. For vape shop owners, this can mean discovering places where you can support the customer service staff, and for the team, it's an opportunity to showcase the areas where they excel or where they need training.

Why is Customer Service Self-Evaluation Important?

A customer service self-evaluation is essential because it opens the lines of communication between the vape shop owner or customer service manager and its customer service staff. Even if you only have a few salesmen in your brick and mortar vape shop, customer service employee feedback can show you areas that need improvement and where your employees feel they need more support.

Another reason customer service self-evaluation is so essential is that you might be able to find the factors that drive or create a successful transaction. With this knowledge, you can better train employees on what to say, what to leave out, and other factors that affect whether a customer makes a purchase or not.

Customer service self-evaluation is also essential because it helps you develop standards for every interaction your staff has with customers. Whether it is on the phone or in person, or by online chat and email, by mimicking the quality standards of the most successful agents, you can guide the rest of the staff on how to behave and act.

Customer Service Self Evaluation Examples

In customer service, self-evaluation examples, you'll often find that three components repeat themselves, these are:

• Specificity
• Metrics
• Results

These three central components are an essential part of a customer service self-evaluation, and often the very best evaluations have them in one way or another. Here's an example of a customer service self-evaluation for vape shops:

"This quarter as a customer service specialist for VapeRanger, I have responded to 500 emails (specificity), have resolved 75% of all inquiries without help from a supervisor (metrics), and have received a 4.7 customer satisfaction rating on the customer feedback survey that was answered after every call or email interaction (results)."

Although this is a brief example, we can see how the performance of the customer service specialist has been tracked in those three key areas. She was specific with the emails she responded to, had metrics that showed how successful she was in answering inquiries, and also had the results she managed to obtain, in this case in customer satisfaction, boasting about the 4.7 ratings she received on customer service feedback surveys. In general, employees' answers to a customer service self-evaluation should look something like this.

How To Conduct a Customer Service Self-evaluation: Step by Step

If you are a vape shop owner or customer service manager who wants to conduct your very own customer service self-evaluation, you'll need to follow specific steps. To properly perform a customer service self-evaluation, you'll need first to collect data, set benchmarks, create a customer service representative self-evaluation template, and finally give feedback on the evaluation to your employees. In the following sections, we break down each step in detail.

Step 1: Examine Performance Data

The first step is to collect performance data. This step will be effortless to develop if you are an eCommerce vape shop and currently use customer service software or CRM software, where KPIs are collected and performance metrics are stored. While you can use as many metrics as you like to use in your self-evaluation, we recommended the following five:

1. Customer Satisfaction: This represents how happy your customers are with the interaction they've just had. This can be measured with a targeted survey after the call, email, or chat interaction with the customer representative. Usually, it measures satisfaction with a 0 to 5 rating.
2. Net Promoter Score: This is the percentage of customers most likely to promote your vape shop. This is measured with a 0 to 5 rating and is sent via email after the phone, email, or chat interaction.
3. First Response Time: This is an important metric. It shows how long a customer has to wait until they get an answer to their question. Your CRM will document the time that elapses between their query and the representative's response.
4. Resolution Time: With this metric, you can see how effective customer representatives are at resolving issues. Again it is measured by the CRM, which will add the first response time until final resolution. The lower this metric is, the better.
5. Active Problems: Another primary metric you need to take into consideration is current active problems. In essence, if there are many active problems in a specific period, it means resolution times and first response times are high, and customer satisfaction and net promoter score are low.

While these are the most important metrics, in our opinion, if you run a brick-and-mortar vape shop, it's almost impossible to measure first response time, resolution time, and active problems.

However, you can still measure the net promoter score and customer satisfaction score by setting up a feedback kiosk with a tablet in the store to rate their interaction. Alternatively, you can collect the customers' emails after every transaction and send them the same feedback survey used in the kiosk via email.

Step 2: Make Sure to Have Predetermined Goals

Now that you have the metrics and the scores you want to examine, it's time for you and possibly the HR manager to develop benchmarks for the whole team. This can help you draw the picture of what a successful customer service representative should look like in your vape shop. In essence, these benchmarks will represent what the company expects of its customer service employees.

In practice, you want to set an ideal score for each of the metrics you have identified. For example, a good resolution time should be less than 24 hours. Operational problems through the week should never be more than 3. The average customer satisfaction score should be above 4 in a month, etc. Make sure to examine past performance to develop these scores and benchmarks so your team can realistically achieve them.

Step 3: Open-Ended Questions

The next order of business is to create a customer service representative self-evaluation template they can fill out. To do this, you'll need to develop a series of Open-ended questions that will facilitate the customer service representative to display their accomplishments and areas of improvement with lengthy, thoughtful responses. Some examples of these leading questions you can include in your template include:

• What are your primary responsibilities?
• What other tasks do you perform on a day-to-day basis?
• Are there areas where the customer service department can improve upon?
• What is the most successful interchange you had with a customer?
• What was the one customer interaction you wish you could change?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What resources or training do you think you need to improve your performance?

Step 4: Self-Rating Section

The next section that must be a part of your customer service self-evaluation template is a self-rating section where they can evaluate themselves in either a 0 to 10 rating system or via a choice rating system that includes three choices: Needs Improvement, Satisfactory, Excellent. Some of the customer service specific areas in which you could use these rating systems include:

• Time Management
• Teamwork
• Performance
• Communication
• Problem-Solving
• Working Under Pressure
• Conflict Resolution Skills
• Creative Thinking

Step 5: Final Feedback

After collecting the answers from your staff, review them in a final one-on-one meeting. In this meeting, you want to clearly state the benchmarks created and if the employee has attained these objectives. You want to be as straightforward as possible on each employee's expectations, especially if this is the first time you are doing a self-evaluation with your staff.

At the same time, you want this to be a conversation, which means that the employee should also share his opinions on the department and the areas that he/she thinks need improvement. Considering the employee's views, come up with a training plan that will improve the employee's performance, and if it's an area that also comes up with other employees, make it a part of your team training.

Conclusion

Customer service self-evaluation can shed light on your staff's performance, clue you in on how to better processes, and maybe even how to improve your team's morale. By performing these self-evaluations quarterly, you can expect the team to improve every four months, which creates better performance. All in all, remember that you are gathering information to serve your customers better, and that should be the end goal.