My experience is not atypical of most consumers. Since service encounters make up most company/customer interactions and transactions, these encounters quality can easily make or break customer loyalty and retention, even when the customer’s product quality experience is exemplary. For example, the occasional interactions with your car dealer or the recurrent ones in a retail environment like a grocery store will affect a customer’s satisfaction levels regardless of how well the car performs or how consistently high quality the merchandise is. In service industries, where servicing encounters are more frequent and frequently more intense, customer retention is constantly at risk.

Customer experiences and perceptions of servicing quality are considerably more complex and problematic than product quality issues. Loyalty-inducing customer satisfaction begins with a customer assuming that he or she has just bought a better mousetrap, and remains at the happy customer level if the item turns out to meet her need and doesn’t break.

What is somewhat counterintuitive is that going forward from the time of purchase, customers base their satisfaction as much on recurring servicing experiences as on the originally perceived qualities or benefits of their acquisition. This would explain why 68% of customers who stop patronizing a business do so because of a bad servicing experience whereas only 17% leave because of product dissatisfaction, and only a combined 13% leave because of the attraction of another competitor or somebody else’s recommendation/referral.

In order to understand the servicing quality issues that negatively impact customers, it is necessary to discover the core dimensions (e.g., ease of doing business) and indicators (e.g., understandable procedures) that define customer requirements and expectations at each customer/company touch point. Since not all things deemed important by customers are equally important, it is necessary to establish relative importance of the various dimensions and indicators.

RECAP is a framework for understanding servicing quality gaps. The instrument was developed by Dr. Rod Stiefbold based on decades of experience doing customer satisfaction and experience research in diverse service quality settings across a dozen industries. RECAP measures a number of key conceptual dimensions or categories empirically ascertained as central to how customers judge quality in servicing at company/customer touch points. RECAP stands for the following:

1. Responsiveness and Completion Time. This refers to an organization’s willingness to help customers and provide prompt servicing, accomplished within acceptable time parameters. It includes three key performance variables: understood my request, satisfactory processing time, and timely communications and follow-up.

2. Ease of Doing Business. This dimension refers to the organization’s approachability or ease of contacting, and ease of working within easily understood rules and procedures, consistently applied. The performance variables are: contacting the right person was easy, paperwork was clear and understandable, and the whole process was hassle-free.

3. Communication and Attitude. Refers to keeping customers informed in words and language they can understand, with the proverbial smile-in-the-voice and an attitude of general helpfulness. The performance variables are: attentive, friendly, and courteous personnel; clear communications about what I needed to do; and clarity about time frames and changes.

4. Accuracy. Refers to performing an interaction with the customer without any inaccuracies and doing it right the first time. The performance variables are: processing was done right the first time, correspondence was error-free, and status updates were accurate.

5. Professionalism and Reliability. Refers to a complex of interconnected performance variables including service reps’ competency in terms of technical skills and knowledge, their respectfulness, their active listening skills with the customer, the dependability of what they promise, and customer-perceived effectiveness in solving a problem. Metrics include: company delivered on its promise to me, reps were professional in dealing with me, and reps resolved any problems effectively.

In our work, CDCI has found the following:

1. Responsiveness and Completion Time. Typically accounts for up to 35% of the total service quality impact on customer satisfaction.
2. Ease of Doing Business. Typically accounts for 20-25% of service quality impact.
3. Communication and Attitude. Typically account for 20-25% of service quality impact.
4. Accuracy. Varies widely by industry in terms of impact on service quality ranging from 10-20%.
5. Professionalism and Reliability. Typically accounts for 15-20% of service quality impact.

Because servicing issues have such a large impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, companies need to have a consistent and reliable way of measuring the customer experience and responding in a real-time manner to address problems before they become major issues that negatively impact customer word of mouth and future purchase behavior. This data needs to both address the individual customer situation and provide strategic and operational data to the company that enables them to eliminate the sources of the servicing issues at their root.