"There is more to helping customers than picking up the phone within three rings or emailing within 24 hours."

This is the major premise from Bill Price and David Jaffe, authors of The Best Service is No Service.  They believe that too many organizations measure customer service by how quicly things are done rather than by how well they were done (or how often or why they needed to be done at all).

They believe the focus should be on "contacts per order, contacts per unit shipped, contacts per transaction, and contacts per customer."  Managers should not be asking just how long it took to help a customer, they should be asking how often the customer needed help and why.  The goal should be to avoid creating a need for a customer to contact the company in the first place.

Examine your organization's operations and locate all of the points where customer interaction is forced on your organization due to breakdowns or inconsistencies in delivering your product or service.  Try to determine the common factors causing this.  The more you dig, the more opportunities you will discover that with some correction, can reduce your internal operating cost be reducing the need for customer contact that requires corrective action. 

And as this need is reduce, your customer's satisfaction levels will rise--because they didn't need to undergo the frustration of extra steps.