Most companies realize you can’t afford to take customer satisfaction for granted. But the techniques they use for gathering and responding to the feedback they get on company performance often fall short of customer expectations. Designing and implementing a high-quality, reliable process for evaluating customer satisfaction requires frequent assessment and action-oriented response mechanisms that ensure survey information is translated quickly and effectively into systemic improvements.
At Landes & Associates, we offer two distinct yet complementary approaches to customer satisfaction systems that get you the information you need from your customers and give you a reliable process for acting on what you hear.
- Short-term Report Cards – A small representative group of customers is asked to give monthly “grades” on performance criteria that are determined to be most relevant to the overall customer base. Those letter grades are converted to numeric equivalents, and the data are posted on charts that are visible to all employees. Customers are asked to complete the “Comment” section if they give a grade of “B” or lower on any of the performance criteria. Specific individuals are assigned to do two things – first, to respond to individual customer issues, and second, to determine if the particular customer problems may require some type of system-wide improvement.
- Annual Surveys – A more extensive assessment should be conducted with a larger segment of the overall customer base on an annual basis. The issues that arise from that assessment should be reviewed and addressed by a specifically designated cross-functional group responsible for systemic initiatives that may be indicated by the survey results.