What are the most effective strategies for identifying and addressing service gaps in real-time?

Feedback from surveys is not your only resource. Pay attention to social media, real-time interactions. Customers are saying more that you think when they are interacting. Pay attention to details.

Service performance issues can be monitored by businesses both reactively (by customer interactions) and proactively (by infra monitoring) given that the right tools are available. In fact, proactive monitoring of service performance is also commoditised as a bundled product now in B2B telecom. Reactive Vigilance: Real time monitoring of Call queues at call centres and ticket upticks at the back office help flag issues in real time. Proactive Precision: Businesses also employ tools that monitor systems and network infrastructure via real-time alarms. From server utilization to network downtime - the alarm monitoring system helps to anticipate and mitigates potential issues before they cascade into customer-facing challenges.

One thing I have found really helpful, is to empower staff to monitor their own performance, through dashboards, reports etc. This introduces a sense of accountability and ownership. A leaderboard along can introduce a sense of friendly competition to push things up a notch.

Zero downtime is becoming a new normal. For service recovery, it's very essential to understand the fact that things fail, people make mistakes and there are going to be factors contributing to service disruptions. Idea here is to implement practices which can enable us to recover fast and possibly without any impact to BAU. Maintaining redundancy at every level and every process component is very essential when we are planning for service recovery strategies. Gone are the days when we had multilayered teams to recover services, time is to have a strong front line defense empowered to take critical decisions during service failures.

Be Honest! There are times where you would mess up and things don't go as well as you would have expected with a customer. Own it up, acknowledge, be proactive and honest, keep communication channels open and share how you would work to ensure this doesn't happen again. Customers respect honesty! Key to Good Customer Service!

Data based analysis and improvement actions : In large volume, pan geographic service operations, the often practice is to initiate action plan for improvements based upon 'symptoms' of the problems. This leads to wasted efforts as the issue will reduce/ resolve temporarily only to resurface later. "Data" based approach for improvement action will lead to permanent / long term improvements.

To fill service gap in real-time we need to capture unbiased and instant behavior of our customer just after opting services, it is best possible through digitalization and without human interaction. Because when human interact for feedback customer get biased about availed services and if the behavior was captured after some time so that no recency effect could be captured. Further also get data series with respect to customer to identify the true behavior of customers.