How Do You Know If You Are Truly Satisfying Your Customers?

How do you tell if you are truly satisfying your customers? It is a very difficult question, one that many companies struggle to answer. In his excellent blog "Buzz Tank" http://www.buzz-tank.com/ John Oswald describes the dilemma:

A lot of the companies that I work with measure their customer experience by measures that wouldn’t really make sense to a customer. Things like First Call Resolution, Right First Time, Cycle Time and so on. Great measures (sometimes) but not terribly meaningful from a customer point of view.

If these common measurements are not the right measurements, then what should we measure?

It could be as simple as what Frederick F. Reichheld suggests in his book "Ultimate Question." Here he believes the answer to one question is a key measure: Would you recommend this company to a friend? The question has interesting implications, but ultimately requires additional queries to find out "Why" or Why Not?" to make the responses actionable.

But is it okay to be directionally correct with your questions? I think that companies that strive to be service leaders must be more precise in their satisfaction measurements. The data that is gathered is not just for "scoreboard" purposes, but also to drive analysis and improvement. Not having good fuel for this entire process is like saying that your car will be okay as long as you put liquid in the gas tank. The better the fuel/data, the better the car/organization will run!

My View

I took the time to comment on the Buzz-Tank blog about measurements, and the quest for "Perfect Knowledge." In that response, I state that I believe that by establishing the "Perfect Guarantee," companies are forced to get to the core of what satisifies customers. One technique of doing that is for customers to describe the "Perfect Service Provider." All efforts--measurement and improvement--can be geared toward that goal.

The response is below:

John--

In my own design, called “Perfect Service,” I believe that discovering what is really important to the customer is so critical that it must almost be forced on the company delivering the service.

Therefore, I advocate using a very strong and material guarantee of customer satisfaction as the rallying point for customer and delivery alike. No sense answering the phone quickly if the conversation is not satisfying, even if you have complied with the letter of a service agreement.

Once you have established the “metric” of customer satisfaction, then the company must discover what is meaningful for that client. Another technique I use is to survey potential and current clients and ask them to describe the “perfect” provider. They will use characteristics that are meaningful to them, not production metrics that are meaningful to the service operation.

By setting up measurement systems and continual improvement processes, you are prioritizing based on a customer satisfaction target. Of course, if you don’t get it right, you end up paying on the guarantee.

Good stuff.