Defog The Mirror Of Customer Satisfaction
Are you using Alice in Wonderland's mirror to look at your company's customer service?
In a study of corporate chief executives conducted by
an international consulting firm it was discovered that 75% of those
executives believed their firms provided "above average" service. When their
customers were surveyed however, the majority had the opposite opinion;
almost 60% stated they were upset with their most recent service experience!
I'd call that a huge disconnect between belief and reality. Maybe those
CEO's are using Alice in Wonderland's mirror to look at the way their
company services their customers.
Rather than ask or discuss why there such a difference between belief in the
level of service and the customer's reality I'm going to ask a different
question. What level of customer service do YOU believe your firm delivers?
Is your answer based on looking into Alice's mirror or do you have data?
What criteria do you use to measure your level of customer service? Is it
the same criteria that your customers use?
One business owner in an industry that delivers a high-personal-touch
service to businesses wanted to know what her customers felt about the
service they received and, if it wasn't as good as they felt it should be,
how it could be improved. So she asks them. Once a month she invites a
half-dozen "average" customers to a breakfast meeting and asks for the good,
the bad, and the ugly. When she finds areas that the business needs to
improve she works to improve them, developing feed-back information loops,
ways of measuring raw data to discover methods of improving, methods of
training staff to a higher awareness of the customer service contact points,
and ways to deliver their products with more courtesy, timeliness, and
consistency.
There are many ways to discover this information depending upon the type of
product or service you sell from follow-up phone calls, emails, mailed
surveys, and personal meetings. They all work. The important thing is to
discover whether you are satisfying your customers and, if there is a
disconnect between belief and reality, to develop an improvement fast. Don't
let your belief fog the mirror of customer satisfaction - clean it with real
data from your customers.
