Establishing a customer satisfaction program

A. Assessing Your Customer Satisfaction Quotient
In order for you to establish an effective game plan to focus on customer satisfaction, you need to know where you’re starting. Following is a self-assessment that, when completed honestly, will begin to point out opportunities for improving your customer satisfaction efforts. For each statement, rate how well you or your organization satisfies the condition.

Use the following scale:
1--Are you kidding?
2--Hardly ever
3--Sometimes
4--Usually
5--It’s our way of life!

• Our Culture
  ____We’re committed to do whatever it takes to create satisfied customers.
  ____We try to do things "right the first time."
  ____Leaders example that customer service is important.
  ____Serving our customers’ needs takes priority over meeting our internal needs.
  Total Score divided by 20 = ___%

• Customer Alignment
  ____When we sell, we aim for a partnership approach.
  ____In our collateral materials, we don’t promise what we can’t deliver.
  ____We know the features and benefits that are most important to our customers
  ____We design new products/services based on info provided by our customers.
  Total Score divided by 20 = ___%

• Error Reduction
  ____We review customer complaints.
  ____We constantly ask our customers for feedback.
  ____We regularly look for ways to eliminate errors based on customer input.
  Total Score divided by 15 = ___%

• Using Customer Info
  ____We’ve determined what our customers expect from us.
  ____We frequently interact with our customers.
  ____The entire organization knows what is important to our customers.
  Total Score divided by 15 = ___%

• Customer Outreach
  ____ We make it easy for our customers to deal with us.
  ____We aim to resolve all customer complaints.
  ____We encourage "wowing the customer."
  Total Score divided by 15 = ___%

• Qualified and Empowered Staff
  ____Employees are respected.
  ____All employees have a good understanding of our product/service.
  ____All employees have the right tools and skills to perform their jobs well.
  ____All employees are encouraged to resolve customer issues.
  ____All employees feel that customer satisfaction is a responsibility of their job.
  Total Score divided by 25 = ___%

• Improving Products/Services and Processes
  ____We constantly work to improve our processes and products.
  ____We network with other groups to learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
  ____When problems are identified, we quickly try to resolve them.
  Total Score divided by 15 = ___%

Now evaluate how well your organization focuses on customer satisfaction. Note the areas where you score high and those where you are low. The low scores will suggest opportunities for improvement. List three areas you need to improve.

Understanding Your Customer Requirements
Sources of customer information.
Often organizations claim to know their customers’ requirements, yet they’ve never taken the time to do a real thorough analysis. Sure, they probably know their customers’ general requirements, but do they know what is really important to their customers, how they measure up relative to the important factors and how they compare to the competition in the areas most important to the customer? In most cases, they don’t and won’t unless they collect this information in a formal, systematic manner.  

• Your own organization
  Without looking too far, you’ll be able to uncover potential areas of customer dissatisfaction by reviewing your key operational data. Check on the status of backlogs or stockouts. If these are significant, chances are you may have some customers that are not happy with your delivery cycle time.
  
  Review your "Returns and Allowances." If they are high, then your customers may be unhappy with the product they purchase—either the quality is inferior or they felt the product was misrepresented and not what they expected at all.
  
  Another place to look is your internal reject or yield rates. If your rejects are high or your yields low, you can bet that some bad product is leaking out to your customer. Even if you inspect the product before shipping it to the customer, tests have shown that inspection isn’t 100% reliable—some bad product will sneak out.
  
  Another measurement to look for is the number of times you must re-do a service. Customers expect you "to do it right the first time." If you don’t they become unhappy. And don’t forget your employees as a valuable source of information on customer requirements. They interact with customers constantly and probably know a great deal about their likes and dislikes.
  
  Begin your search for customer data in-house. Most likely you’ll uncover some things that you can fix immediately, which will make your customers happy and get you started on the right track. Review your internal data to pinpoint potential problem areas for customers. Also, gather your employees together and get their inputs on your customers’ satisfaction level. Assemble a list of strengths and weaknesses, but don’t get bogged down in the details. You’re looking for a few areas where you can begin making improvements.

• Customers
  You should start with a review of customer complaints and inquiries. If you don’t have a systematic way of collecting these, you should develop one. Both are good indicators of opportunity areas. However, don’t limit yourself to just complaints and inquiries. Studies show that only 2-4% of dissatisfied customers ever complain. If you’re only looking at complaints, you’re missing the other 96-98% who have problems with you.
  
  Surveys and focus groups are two of the most popular methods for gathering information on customer needs. Surveys are written questions given to individual customers; focus groups are oral questions administered to groups of customers. Both must have clear and specific goals up front in order to be successful. A broad questionnaire or focus group session provides you with a lot of information, but it’s usually too general to be of any value. Objectives must be clear and questions specific if they are to provide results that can be acted upon. Although focus groups and surveys are similar in what they want to accomplish, one may be more suitable than the other, depending on the application. Surveys are relatively simple and economical to administer and can reach large amounts of customers.
  
  On the other hand, focus groups take more time and effort, are often more expensive to administer and may not be as far-reaching as surveys, but their interactive nature may produce clearer feedback. The best results are found when combinations of both techniques are used to identify customer requirements and expectations
  
  Review customer complaints and inquiries. Identify the top three requests and compare them with the list you created from your internal data and employee inputs. Do you find any overlap? Any surprises?

The best kind of customer data
More is not necessarily better when it comes to customer data, but getting the right kind of data is critical. Following are the key characteristics of good customer data

• Ongoing
  One thing is certain, change is going to happen. Your customers may change; their needs may change; the environment may change (e.g., the competition gets tougher) regulations change, and most certainly you will change. As you improve, your customers expectations will likely rise, too. To respond to these changing needs, you’ll need to constantly assess your customers. How often you assess your customers will depend on your business, its sales volume, and the relative value of its product or service.
  
  For instance, a fast food restaurant that sells thousands of hamburgers a week may survey its customers continuously while a large equipment manufacturer that sells only a few pieces of equipment each month may survey customers once a year.

• Specific
  In order to make the kind of improvements your customers will appreciate, you’ll need to have specific feedback. While general inputs may give you an overall tone of the customer, you can only respond to specific feedback. For instance, rather than "the length of time that I have to wait in line is satisfactory", try instead "how much time is satisfactory to wait in line?"

• Timely
  If you’re working with old data, it may no longer reflect customer sentiments.

• Focused
  Organizations have limited resources. While the problems can be overwhelming, you can realistically work on just a few. If you try to do too much, you might not do anything well. Weight your problems according to importance. This will help to narrow down the list of opportunities to just the few on which you should concentrate

• Competitive comparison
  You should always know where you stand in comparison to your competition. If your customers are willing to provide you with that feedback, take it. And’ you won’t need a separate survey, either. When you ask your customers to rate your performance, ask them to rate your competition as well

C. Creating Your Customer Vision And Service Policies
The Vision
In order to transform your company into one that values customer satisfaction, you must establish a customer-centered vision for your company. In other words, your vision is what you want your organization to become, what you want it "to grow up to be." And, a client-centered vision is one, which takes its direction from the customer.

This vision has two critical functions that it performs. First, it serves as a source of inspiration that rallies the organization around a single unifying purpose, which in this case is the customer.

The second duty this vision performs is that it guides decision-making and aligns an organization so that all functions work towards a single goal.

In the business world, there are rarely black and white decisions to make, but there is an awful lot of gray. With a vision that spells out what the organization wants to become, it provides direction needed to make better decisions. After all, an employee who knows where the business wants to head is more likely to make decisions that reinforce that goal.

So how do you create a vision? It’s really quite easy. Vision statements need not be elaborate. For instance, Ray Kroc’s vision for McDonald’s was "Quality, Service, Cleanliness, Value." Keep your vision short and concise so that your organization is clear on the meaning.

Some advice on how to get started is:

• Imagine it’s ten years from now, and you are reading an article in a magazine about your company. What successes have you had? What can you attribute the success to?

• Think about what is important to your organization. List the top five of these.

• Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What is most important to you as a customer?

• Close your eyes and visualize your organization in the future.

• Describe in detail what makes up that picture.

You now should have a good start on your customer-centered vision. Take a few moments and write it down.

Establishing customer-friendly policies
There isn’t anything that makes a customer angrier than someone saying, "I’m sorry, that’s our policy." In many cases policies exist because "that’s the way we’ve always done it before." Take an inventory of your organization’s policies. Do they facilitate customer satisfaction or do they only erect barriers and cause customer frustration?

If you’re having difficulty identifying these "unfriendly" policies, review your customer complaints and assessments. A quick scan of the feedback is sure to direct you to some of these "unfriendly" policies. Now segregate your "friendly" and "unfriendly" policies into necessary and unnecessary groups. Immediately, throw out your unnecessary "unfriendly" policies. You don’t need them and they are most likely frustrating the heck out of your customers

Keep your "friendly" necessary policies and strengthen them even more if you can. Finally, create more unnecessary "friendly" policies where possible. Use customer friendly policies as a competitive edge and keep your customers coming back for more.

Now, take a few moments and, together with your customer complaint and feedback data, revise your policies so that they are customer-friendly. Are there any additional "policies" that you can institute that would further differentiate you from your competition?

D. Dealing Effectively With Your Customers
Now, once you’ve established your customer-centered vision and created customer-friendly policies, you are ready to sharpen your skills necessary to deal effectively with your customers. These skills can be segregated into two areas—communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Communication skills
How you communicate to your customers is just as important as what you communicate. Following you will find some behavioral skills that will communicate to your customer that you are an organization that values their business.

• Greet your customers
  "Put them at ease and make them feel comfortable!" When your customer or prospective customer first walks in or telephones you with an inquiry or order make him feel welcomed. This sets the tone for the rest of the transaction. If this is the first time with this customer, this is when first impressions can help or hurt, depending on how well you make your customer feel within those first critical moments. If favorable, he’ll continue talking, browsing, or ordering. If unfavorable, you may have lost a customer forever.

• Value customers
  "Let me know that you think I’m important!" Customers want to feel special, and to make them feel special your attitude and behavior must say, "You’re the customer—you pay my salary. You make my job possible." When you value customers your sincerity makes them feel good about you and your organization.
  
  A customer-focused organization is not in business to deliver a product or service, but instead, is there to enable people to enjoy the benefits of its product or service. The difference is demonstrated by the temporary employment agency that is in business not to fill in job vacancies with temporary personnel, but rather to help their customers enjoy the benefits that their service provides—immediate placement of highly skilled individuals. The difference is subtle, but the effect is not!

• Ask how to help your customers
  "Find out what I want!" You’ve already gotten a "head start" on that by reviewing customer complaints and other feedback, but it is important to make each customer encounter one that makes them feel special. You do that by trying to understand their needs each time you deal with them. Not just their overall needs, but their needs at that particular moment. A desire to genuinely understand your customers’ needs or wants will provide you with the edge you’re looking for. Now, how do you do that? Simply, find out why they came in or contacted you—"So what can I do for you today, Mr. Jones?" Then ask open-ended questions to further understand their needs.

• Listen to customers
  "Please listen to me and understand me!" Listen totally—to your customer’s words, their tone, their body language. According to a UCLA study on communication, 7% of our communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice, and 55% is nonverbal. Listening totally will enhance your understanding of what your customer really needs, as well as make them feel valued.

• Help customers
  "Help me get what I want!" Customers don’t buy products and services for what they are, but instead, they buy for the benefits that the products and services offer. That’s why you must be customer-focused rather than product- or service-focused. Don’t waste your time explaining your product or service features. Explain how your product or service benefits them—how it satisfies a need, solves their problems, or gives them extra value. Instead of "Super Duper Carpet Cleaner offers the latest in stain-resistant technology, "you should try "Super Duper’s newest technology continuously repels stains for up to 20 years so you’ll never have to clean your carpets!"

• Invite customers back
  "Let me know that I’m welcome back anytime!" This is about last impressions. Thank them for coming in or contacting you. Tell them you’d like to see them (or hear from them) again. Then, try to do something that makes them want to come back (or refer you to a friend or colleague)--maybe a discount off of their next appointment for referring a friend. The interesting thing about last impressions is that’s how your customers will feel about you until you have a chance to interact with them again. If you do it right, your business will surely reap the benefits.

Problem-solving skills
Problems will always occur, but taking responsibility for these problems can turn a negative customer into a positive one. Studies show that if a problem is resolved quickly, 98% of your customers will buy again and even tell colleagues that they had a positive experience! However, the longer the problem drags on, the more frustrated a customer becomes, and the less likely he is to be satisfied. So how do you resolve problems quickly? Read on for a process to help you do just that!

• Understand the problem
  "Try to understand my problem from my viewpoint!" First, "get the facts, Jack!" Listen non-defensively. Then, repeat your understanding of the problem back to make sure it is accurate. For example, your customer is having a problem with the centrifuge that you sold him. You listen to his problem non-defensively, probing him for more information, then say, "As I understand the problem, the fluid that is extracted does not have any sludge."

• Identify the cause of the problem
  "Take enough time to understand what caused my problem!" After you understand the problem, you’re ready to identify possible causes of the problem. First, you should find out what happened ("I’m operating the unit according to the instructions."). Next, you need to find out what should have happened ("There should have been sludge in the sludge tank."). Then, find out what went wrong ("There wasn’t any sludge in the tank, or any place else that I could see!").

• Discuss possible solutions
  "Explore possible solutions with me!" At this time you should suggest possible options ("You may not have the model that removes the sludge from the reservoir, maybe the wrong instructions were enclosed, or maybe the centrifuge has malfunctioned.") Next, you should ask your customer for ideas ("Do you think it is a malfunction or is the wrong model/instructions enclosed? Do you have any other ideas?"). Finally, agree on a course of action ("Let’s first check the model numbers to make sure that the instructions are for your centrifuge.").

• Solve the problem
  "Solve my problems, and you’ll enjoy my loyalty forever!" Now it’s time to remove the cause or take corrective action ("Ah ha! The model numbers don’t match. The instructions are for our lower end model that doesn’t extract the sludge automatically. Do you want to keep this model, and I can send you the appropriate instructions? Or would you prefer the lower end model with a cash refund for the difference?"). Now, ask your customer if he is satisfied with the resolution ("Have we solved your problem satisfactorily? Is there anything else we can do?").

• Finally, the kicker
  Offer something to the customer to compensate him for his troubles ("And for your troubles—we’ll be sending you a case of tank cleaner that should arrive at your business next week. Again, I’m sorry for the problem this has caused you, but thanks for letting us resolve it.")

E. Educating Your Staff
Now that you’ve learned to assess your current customer service condition, understand your customers’ requirements, create a customer-centered vision, establish customer-friendly policies, and deal with your customers more effectively, you need to educate your staff (if you have one) on how to carry out your customer service focus. This will involve two steps, which are communicating your focus and training your staff.

• Communicate your focus
  Schedule a meeting to roll out your vision for your organization and to explain the reasoning behind your customer service focus. Make this meeting mandatory. To succeed, you need to get your staff’s full cooperation and buy-in. After all, the vision and policies must become theirs, not just yours. At the end of the meeting, determine the next course of action with responsibilities and timing noted.
  
  Important to note—This should not be the only time that you talk to your staff about the importance of a customer focus. You must work it into your daily routine and your regular meetings. It must become the basis for your entire business. And you must demonstrate by example—"Walk the talk" and reinforce the fact that things are going to be different from now on.

• Training
  In order to achieve your customer-centered vision, your staff must be properly trained to do so. As mentioned earlier, some of this training can be incorporated into existing meetings. It’s important that you do include some training in your regular meetings so that it becomes a part of your normal operations. However, you’ll find you’ll need to schedule an incremental amount of time to train personnel in problem-solving and communication skills. Again, so this isn’t the "boss’s program," suggest that a team of volunteers determine the organization’s training needs and outline a suitable approach. Then, have them present it to the rest of the organization in an upcoming meeting.

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