We all talk about measuring customer satisfaction and comparing it with any indices in the industry. “Is the amount spent on customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement programmes really worth it,” is a question often asked by business owners. The answer is “No”, unless these programmes deliver the insights you need to attract, retain and expand business with your customers.
Six Sigma and other programmes that rely heavily on satisfaction metrics will not help unless they focus on driving desirable customer behaviour.
There are different ways to look at this issue and arrive at a measurement system.
Listen To Customers
First, listen to the customer. Go beyond a single, all-purpose survey. To get the customer information you need, you must use multiple listening posts that gauge satisfaction and loyalty at multiple levels—that take the pulse of the overall relationship as well as the day-to-day transactions.
The best listeners, moreover, include all stakeholders—from customer decision-makers, customer end-users, channel partners to employees. The listening process must capture and evaluate appropriate products, services, cost and image factors that may affect customer behaviour.
While many businesses believe that they know and can articulate these factors, it is easy to go off track with this inside-out view.
You need to hear directly from customers and not rely on internal jargon that may be meaningless. Only customers can tell you what drives their satisfaction, loyalty and value perceptions.
Next, focus on core requirements to establish priorities for change. The goal of loyalty and satisfaction measurement programmes is to get them to be loyal, to buy more, to become an advocate and so on.
Prioritise
To accomplish this, you need to re-evaluate how you serve your customers. Set priorities and focus on those key product or service elements that have the greatest effect on satisfaction and loyalty.
Research has shown that different items have different effects on satisfaction and loyalty. Certain elements are so-called key dissatisfiers, where not meeting expectations will cause overall dissatisfaction but exceeding expectations will not necessarily lead to customer delight.
Other items are key enhancers, where exceeding expectations will improve customer satisfaction but not delivering on them has little effect on dissatisfaction.
Take Feedback Seriously
Consider linking customer feedback to internal processes. Management teams must examine customer survey results with any existing operational or transaction metrics available.
You must define the specific internal processes that touch areas, which deliver value to your customers. Analytical models can validate and link these internal process metrics to your satisfaction survey results. You can frequently track and act on the few critical internal metrics that are leading indicators of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As business owners, it is in your hands to make change happen. The best measurement programmes are useless unless they trigger appropriate operational and policy changes.
Satisfaction and loyalty measurement programmes must include processes for prioritising changes, developing action plans and metrics, and ensuring that improvements are made. It should also link to any innovation processes that you have in place.
Deployment and action-planning workshops with key business stakeholders are good tools to use to clarify findings and help the learning process throughout the organisation.
Remember to use all the information available to you. Satisfaction data cannot stand alone, it must be integrated with other information you have in your customer and operational databases. For example, analytic models can calibrate survey loyalty measures with actual retention and attrition data, providing a great payoff.
Showing how an improvement in survey results reduces churn is a great management tool. You can use these models to predict which types of customers are at risk of leaving and to direct your customer acquisition and retention efforts.
Above everything else, as owners, you must keep monitoring the ROI of all efforts. Because top management cares most about bottom-line results, you must link improvements in survey results to profits.
Use Analytics
A good way to do this is to use advanced analytic techniques to model how customer lifetime value varies with satisfaction and loyalty measures. This way, you can determine the return on programmes that improve customer relationships.
If you are investing in customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement programmes, you need to evaluate your programmes on each of the above principles, which help transform measurement programmes from just another cost of doing business to drivers of growth and profit.
The bottom line is that measurement programmes must demonstrate that they pay off with improved financial results by creating more satisfied and more loyal customers.
