Question

Scenario

You are a manager at a retail pharmacy outlet called One Pharmacy. Your store is in a very socially and culturally diverse suburb. Sometimes your staff members complain that the customers they serve are rude, unreasonable or difficult to understand. You realise your customer service systems may need to be reviewed and updated to best support your staff in serving the needs of your customers

1.1)   Customer service standards should ensure all customers are treated with respect, and staff members need to have the skills and understanding to provide excellent customer service in all situations. List 2 examples of customers with different backgrounds and needs (30 -40 words

1.2)   You are reviewing your customer service system. Identify three 3 areas of business and / or processes to improve customer service.

1.3)   Your customer service system incorporates a customer service strategy, a customer service model and customer service standards. Explain in 100 words the difference between a customer service strategy and a customer service model.

1.4)   Discuss the RATER customer service model. What does RATER stand for, and what are its 2 primary features?

1.5)   There are 5 key elements in the RATER model. Explain each of the elements in this model(50 words-100 words each )

1.6)   Briefly define what customer service standards are in 25 words, and broadly list the 3 different types of standards relevant to One Pharmacy.

1.7)   According to Australian Consumer law, what are 2 rights and responsibilities of customers?(100-150 words)

Answer 1

1.1 Great customer service is the holy grail of business. Once you have it, it seems like it has the power to reveal all the secrets of success. Customer Diversity is providing great customer experience across cultures.When customer service representatives acknowledge and respect diversity, they have a greater opportunity to attract and retain diverse customers, build better rapport with them and increase customer satisfaction.Knowing and understanding customer needs is at the centre of every successful business, whether it sells directly to individuals or other businesses.Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to persuade potential and existing customers that buying from you is in their best interests

An example 1:

An important step into improving customer satisfaction might be authorizing your service representatives to take extra time to help customers overcome language difficulties or to provide additional explanations when needed. This might require adjusting your internal policy of handling calls and even increase average call processing time as it takes more time for non-native speakers of English to collect their thoughts and translate questions from their native tongue.

Example 2:

It’s especially critical when your company’s marketing efforts are aimed at some new segments of the market. Customer service representatives should be aware of such campaigns to be able to properly deal with members of the communities targeted for the business expansion. Otherwise, communication obstacles and being not ready to interact with new group of customers might have a detrimental effect on business or customer relationships.On the other hand, try to make the most of every piece of information you might have at hand

• Know your client.
• Spend time talking with clients to learn about where they are from.
• Seek out culture-specific knowledge of your customers.
• Recognize patterns for communicating.
• Attract diverse customers by having a diverse workforce.
• Build relationships.

1.2 Excellent customer service involves meeting and surpassing expectations. It means showing the customer how important he or she is to you and the business by interacting with he or she in a friendly- helpful and positive way. It include remembering and appreciating repeat customers, forging a local connection with shoppers, putting your product knowledge to good use, and more. Read on below to discover what you can do to level up your customer strategies.

1. Seek Customer Feedback
To provide excellent customer service, you first need understand their needs, experiences, and pain points.For these, you need to ensure that you provide your customers multiple ways to share their feedback. You can do this through telephone surveys or a feedback form sent via email. Other than surveys, you can also establish a complaint system, which will better enable your customers to raise their issues.This will let you know all about their good, bad, and ugly experiences when interacting with your brand. Through this, you gain real insights into what you're doing well, and which areas require improvement. Connecting with your customers to gather feedback also has another important benefit - it makes them feel that you value them, and are willing to resolve their issues. This can help to establish trust, and may even prevent them from sharing their concerns or negative comments on social media.

2. Strengthen Your Customer Service Team
Improving your customer service begins with building a strong customer service team. Here’s how you can strengthen your service performance.Hire and Train Professionals with the Right SkillsNo tool or AI element will compensate for the lack of a skilled workforce - when you hire people for your customer service team, you should look for individuals with the right skills.Also organize training sessions for them to improve their skills once they’re on board.

• Empathy and Patience - A customer service rep has to deal with different types of customers: Some may be annoying or confused, while others may have a lot of questions. A customer support representative needs to deal with all of them patiently and professionally.
• Good Communication skills - The people you hire must be confident and possess excellent communication skills. They should be able to convey what they mean in a positive way, and they should strive to never end conversations in a way that leaves a customer dissatisfied.
• Knowledge - Ensure that your customer service representatives have complete knowledge of your product, services, and pricing plans. If they aren’t sure of something, it’s best to say, “I’ll get back to you after checking with our product team,” than to provide incorrect information.

3. Leverage Multi-Channel Servicing

It enable customers to switch between multiple channels yet enjoy a consistent quality of service. This can help boost your brand’s reputation and credibility.

• Mobile Devices - People expect good support services when they're on-the-go. You need to ensure that your customer service and support pages are mobile-ready to meet their expectations.
• Social Media - Many consumers are turning to social networks (especially Twitter) for customer queries and complaints. You should utilize the power of social media to bridge the gap between you and your consumers. Improve your response times on social media queries and provide effective solutions to your customers.
• Self-Service - Many customers expect brands to help them fix minor issues by themselves, and they'll often look for such solutions on your website’s FAQ pages. Your FAQ pages should provide easy-to-understand fixes to all common problems.

1.3 Customer service standards are the measurable micro goals towards the bigger goal of customer satisfaction. They're the minimum height your service reps should be able to jump. Good customer service has four key qualities: It's personalized, competent, convenient, and proactive. These four factors have the biggest influence on the customer experience.

Customer service strategies and customer service model:

They're not the same thing, but they are related. The difference between customer service and customer experience is that while customer service is one piece of the puzzle — focused on human interaction and directly supporting customers — customer experience is the sum of the entire customer journey with your business.

Customer service strategies is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.It requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

Customer service model involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. It captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer service model includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service strategy and customer service model are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

1.4 The RATER Model is a tool for evaluating the quality of your company's services. It is an acronym that stands for Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness, each of which is a different dimension against which the quality of your service provision is assessed.

The primary features include

1. It is used to measure customer expectations and service quality
2. it highlights 5 dimensions that customers consider when using a service.

1.5 According to the RATER framework, your customers evaluate your business based on 5 metrics either consciously or unconsciously. These include:

Reliability
Assurance
Tangibles
Empathy
Responsiveness
These 5 dimensions can be measured by the RATER scale which helps you determine customer expectations and what your company delivers. You can then take the necessary actions to improve service quality.

1. Reliability
Reliability refers to the delivery of agreed service as promised by your company. The service you offer has to be reliable and this can be achieved when you deliver service on time, regularly, and accurately. It is the most important service dimension in the RATER model.When you don’t offer services to your customers as they expect, your company won’t be reliable for them. When you can’t deliver products on time, when your product doesn’t offer what it claims, or when the product is faulty are a few instances when your company will turn out to be unreliable. This is the case when your customers will clearly say that your company isn’t reliable.And when your company isn’t reliable, it means one of the two things:You are unable to deliver the promised service to your customersYour customers misunderstood what your service is.The service that you deliver should be communicated clearly. You need to create customer expectations based on what service you’ll offer them with. When you don’t set the right expectations, it will eventually make your business unreliable.

2. Assurance
Assurance is the dimension that deals with trust and credibility. Do your customers trust you? Do they consider you an expert in the industry? Do your employees and salespersons demonstrate knowledge and expertise? Do customers trust what your employees say?Meeting customer expectations get easier when you can show them that you are trustworthy and know what you are doing. This includes answering customer queries and concerns effectively and professionally. If a potential customer wants to know how your software will help him reduce his monthly budget, you need to tell that your tool doesn’t reduce the monthly budget rather it only helps you manage finances.Answer customer queries and concerns proactively and accurately. Train your customer support and sales staff. Educate your customers by addressing their common issues. Be honest and transparent. Use trust symbols and indicators on your website

3. Tangibles
It refers to the physical aspect of your service such as website, office, staff, equipment, etc. How do your customers respond to the tangibles that you have created? Does the physical environment of your business look appealing?Tangibles don’t always mean something that has a physical appearance rather it refers to the image of your business. If you have an ecommerce store, the tangibles will include your website, online store, product photos, website layout, product descriptions, payment methods that you allow, online customer support, and so on. If you own a local travel agency, tangibles will include your office, vehicles, staff uniform

4. Empathy
It refers to your employee’s empathic behavior. Does your customer support team emphasize with customers? Your staff must be empathic and your customers should get this feeling.Your customer support staff has to be empathic. When a customer contacts support and shares a problem, he wants to be emphasized. This is the first rule of customer support and your customers expect this from your staff.The basic rule of emphasizing is listening to the problem, apologizing, offering assistance, and letting the customer know that you are working on the solution. This works best.

• Listen to your customers
• Apologize
• Train your customer support agents
• Update customers on the progress of their complains

5. Responsiveness
Responsiveness refers to your company’s ability and willingness to offer quick and quality services to the customers. How effectively you respond to your customers and how fast you do it. You have to be available to respond to customers when they need you.There are several steps you can take to be responsive:Be available across all the channels where your customers are

• Train your staff
• Use software and tools to boost responsiveness
• Try responding to customer queries within 24 hours
• Set up automatic replies
• Be active on social media 24/7 to instantly respond to customer queries

1.6 Customer service standards are a set of policies and expectations that have been created and adopted by a company. In a sense, they are the expectations or rules for conduct in any customer transaction and how you want customers to feel about their experience with your company.specifies requirements that should be fulfilled by a service to establish its fitness for purpose. The standard may provide definitions, indicators of service quality and their levels, or specify a time period for delivery, such as the standard on handling customer complaints.

1. Customers come first. Companies need to understand who they are, what they hope to accomplish and what they need to feel satisfied throughout their shopping journeys.
2. Service follows.
3. Location is last.

Standard types relevant for pharmacy includes

• facilities;
• procedure;
• personnel

The requirements of good standards in pharmacy practice

• Good pharmacy practice requires that a pharmacist's first concern in all settings is the welfare of patients.
• Good pharmacy practice requires that the core of the pharmacy activity is the supply of medication and other health care products of assured quality, appropriate information and advice for the patient, and monitoring of the effects of use.
  •Good pharmacy practice requires that an integral part of the pharmacist's contribution is the promotion of rational and economic prescribing and of appropriate use of medicines.
  •Good Pharmacy Practice requires that the objective of each element of pharmacy service is relevant to the patient, is clearly defined and is effectively communicated to all those involved.

1.7 The Australian Consumer Law sets out consumer rights that are called consumer guarantees. These include your rights to a repair, replacement or refund as well as compensation for damages and loss and being able to cancel a faulty service.Consumers are protected by the Consumer Bill of Rights. The bill states that consumers have the right to be informed, the right to choose, the right to safety, the right to be heard, the right to have problems corrected, the right to consumer education, and the right to service.

1. TheRight to Be Informed

As a consumer, you have a right to receive accurate informa-tion. Consumers can make wise decisions only if they have the information they need. Businesses are required to provide certain details about their products. For example, drug companies must list the complete contents of every medicine. Clothing manufacturers must list the fi bers used in materials. Packaged foods must show all ingredients, with the main one listed fi rst. Companies provide this information through product labeling.

2. The Right to Choose

The consumers can choose from a wide variety of goods and services. Businesses compete with each other to sell their products to consumers. They offer new products, lower prices, higher quality, or improved services to get you to choose their products. Competition provides choices. A lack of it hurts consumers.