ABSTRACTWhile everyone talks about the importance of providing outstanding customer service, few can explain how to determine if your customer service department is doing it. This article describes a procedure recently implemented by an innovative firm to evaluate the performance of its customer service department. Importance-performance analysis was used to examine customer perceptions of the customer service department's efforts. In addition, satisfaction measures were compared with those obtained for the three primary competitors within the market. This analysis provided a systematic, quantitative, and relatively thorough evaluation of the firm's customer service department, and could serve as a benchmark for others.