Customer Satisfaction: Improve Through Management Action

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The result? The intent of the presentation was lost. The audience got side-tracked into details about the survey development and administration. Although this data was to be an important input to the company’s future business plans, to be built during the off-site session, the management team failed to appreciate the customer satisfaction trends in the data and, more importantly, what their customers were saying about their products and services.

Sound familiar? How many times have you worked in an organization that implemented a customer satisfaction survey and the results continue to gather dust on management shelves? Many of these reports require significant investment of time and money and are expected to capture customers’ attitudes and feelings about the service received. Yet, many companies do not take the necessary action to address issues and concerns raised, opportunities identified, or recognition expressed.

Customer satisfaction surveys do not provide fast, actionable data. As a result, management will focus on those tools and techniques that allow them to take immediate action. This is appropriate for a short term wins strategy but is not useful when seeking longer term solutions for systemic customer service issues. Tendency is to jump to solutions and implementation of the solutions rather than focusing on diagnosis of the issue, the causes for the issue, and developing a specific plan on how to address the issue.

Companies that identify significant payback for their customer satisfaction activities share characteristics different from those that do not.

Management believes that customer satisfaction is directly affected by employee satisfaction. Managers shares business plans and specifics of how the business works with their employees. They encourage employee input about customer requirements, issues, concerns and even, kudos. Managers in these organizations believe those closest to the customer add the most value to the customer relationship and recognize that the front line employee deals with the customer daily handling these issues and complaints. Although this information may be oftentimes anecdotal, and not empirical, evidence of customer satisfaction, it does provide management with what is important to customers and employees during these daily interactions. Employee input to the strategic direction and business planning process may be indirect but it is sought during the normal course of business and becomes an integral part of this process.