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Customer Satisfaction Consulting Services
ISO 9001:2000 now requires organizations to measure customer satisfaction.
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What is a "satisfied" customer?
Symptoms of satisfied customers are:
- repeat spending with your organization and
- telling friends and colleagues about the advantages of dealing with and purchasing from your organization.
Conversely, dissatisfied customers defect to your competitor, and
while they are defecting, they tell friends and colleagues their
reasons for not doing business with your organization!
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Why spend resources to keep your customers satisfied?
Business managers have calculated the life long value of a customer.
They multiply the yearly profit from a customer by the number of
years a typical customer will repurchase from you. When you lose profitable customer, you lose the remaining lifetime value of that
customer.
And, they calculate that an organization spends five times as much
to find a new customer as to keep an existing customer. Today, we
know that when an organization keeps its existing customers, the
organization's bottom line is positively affected.
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What can an organization do to ensure its customers are satisfied before symptoms of dissatisfaction appear?
Organizations that constantly measure their customers' satisfaction,
and then make changes to increase that satisfaction are using one of
the keys to achieving bottom line performance. There are many
ways to measure customer satisfaction. One way is to track the
results, or "indicators", of your customers' satisfaction, such as
repeat business, complaints, and product returns. However, these
measures do not allow your organization to prevent customer
defection. That is why simply monitoring and fixing complaints is a
reactive effort. Because only one out of ten customers take the
time to complain, complaint monitoring does not provide a total
picture of your customers' satisfaction. A better way is to track
your customers' satisfaction before you see complaints and
defection!
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Do not most business managers understand what satisfies their customers?
Surprisingly, the answer is, "No". Beyond obvious customer
requirements such as courtesy and integrity from your organization,
many customers have expectations and needs that are driven by
industry standards and by how they use your product or service.
Customers' perception of your business is their reality!
Organizations need to understand that reality in order to design
products, services, and processes that meet their customers'
expectations and needs.
The following lists some reality checkpoints:
- Have we allowed customers to tell us what is important to
them, and did we listen?
- Do we measure what they told us is important?
- Do we integrate their needs and expectations into our planning?
- Do we know how our customers use our product or service?
- Do we know how our product or service adds value to
them/their business?
- Do we understand our customers' total experience when
they deal with us?
- Do our employees understand what is important to customers?
- Are we customer-focused, i.e. do we allow our customers'
expectations and needs drive how we organize and run our
business?
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How does my organization get started measuring our customers' satisfaction?
It helps to see your customer satisfaction measurement and
improvement activity as a process. As a process, customer
satisfaction and improvement includes the following steps:
- Make your organization aware of the importance of
customer satisfaction
- Decide what your organization needs to know
- Plan how to procure customer feedback
- Do it, including both qualitative and quantitative measures
- Summarize the feedback
- Organize improvement efforts
- Improve processes, involving customers
- Re-measure your customers' satisfaction
SAI Global can deliver the training and support your
organization needs to understand and implement a customer
satisfaction measurement and improvement program. From
awareness to how-to training, to consulting activity working with
your customer satisfaction measurement owner, to integrating
improvement activity with your quality system and quality
improvement teams, we can provide the expertise to
achieve your customer satisfaction objectives.
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