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Customer Satisfaction The Prime Concern of Your Business and the Critical Component of Its Profitability |
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Customer Expectations Customer is defined as anyone who receives that which is produced by the individual or organization that has value. Customer expectations are continuously increasing. Brand loyalty is a thing of the past. Customers seek out products and producers that are best able to satisfy their requirements. A product does not need to be rated highest by customers on all dimensions, only on those they think are important. Customer Satisfaction - a Critical Component of Profitability Exceptional customer service results in greater customer retention, which in turn results in higher profitability. Customer loyalty is a major contributor to sustainable profit growth. To achieve success, you must make superior service second nature of your organization. A seamless integration of all components in the service-profit chain - employee satisfaction, value creation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profit and growth - links all the critical dynamics of top customer service. Getting Right Customer Feedback Don't get customer feedback only from surveys and answers to casually posed questions: "How would you rate your satisfaction with our product or service?" The same results of such surveys can be interpreted in completely different ways. Surveys and focus groups don't analyze customer feedback with precision, and their results are notoriously susceptible to distortion. Customer connection comes from involving customers, partnering with them. Partnering with customers represents your firm's "capacity to anticipate what customers need even before they know they need it."4 Customer Satisfaction Illusion and Trap Today, "it would be difficult to find a company that doesn't proudly claim to be a customer-oriented, customer-focused, or even-customer driven enterprise. But look closer at how these companies put their assertions into practice, and often you discover an array of notions and assumptions that range from superficial and incomplete to misguided."3 Some examples of customer satisfaction illusion include:
All these approaches are well intentioned, but "all of them offer, at best, partial solutions to their customer satisfaction, and all, as a result, fall short."3 There is nothing wrong with the notion of customer satisfaction per se. "The problem comes with its pursuit, which if fraught with peril. Most plans to improve customer satisfaction stand on two shaky - and dangerous - assumptions."3 What they create is an illusion - the customer satisfaction trap. Too often, measurement of customer satisfaction are misleading - they tell you very little about where you are, and they can't show you where to go. Customer Intimacy Works Customer intimacy "starts with a commitment to deliver the best results to each customer. That's why it works."3 Today's customers refuse to be anonymous. They continue to raise the level of their requirements, but their range extends beyond best price and best product. Today's customers want exactly the right selection of products or services that will help them get exactly the total solution they have in mind. Now, more than ever, customers hunger for superior results from the products or services they use. And customer intimacy gives it to them.
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Bibliography:
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"Extreme Management", Mark Stevens, 2001
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"Exceptional Customer Service", Lisa Ford, David McNair, and Bill Perry, 2001
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"Customer Intimacy", Fred Wiersema, 1996
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"Results-Based Leadership", Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, and Norm Smallwood, 1999
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"Customer Retention in a Week", Jane Smith, 2000
