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Expert Opinion
Ozgur Ekmekci, assistant professor at the Department of
Clinical Management and Leadership at The George Washington University
in the United States, writes that the quality of services experienced
by customers is subjective, and based largely upon perception. In
essence, this means that customer satisfaction is the memory of a
customer’s experience when he/she has dealt with frontline employees.
[1]
Figure 1, see below, illustrates the relationship between
perceived service levels provided and quality of products offered:
-
Idolise: customers may fall
into this category if they experience good service and find that the
quality of products offered is superior to what they expected. In
effect, they may idolise a company or organisation.
-
Trivialise: if good service
is experienced but the product is not considered to be superior,
customers may trivialise their relationship with a company or
organisation.
-
Rationalise: if a service is
bad but product quality is strong, customers may rationalise the
situation for the sake of a good product.
-
Criticise: bad service with a
weak product will be criticised.
It should be noted that as the
level of customer satisfaction falls, either because of poor service or
inferior product quality, there are increased risks of losing both
sales volume and customers.
Ekmekci notes that customer service
is a holistic experience and seldom the result of a single exchange
with a single individual. It is more of a “composite sketch” comprising
all exchanges that have taken place over time. For this reason, it is
vital to maintain historical records of customer interactions; these
have to be made available to customer service personnel so that service
issues may be addressed and a higher level of personalised service
delivered. Customers expect organisations to serve them consistently
by:
-
asking them what they need
-
telling them what the
organisation will do for them—and when it will be done
-
doing what needs to be done
on time, and
-
telling them what has
actually been done, and when it was done.
Mark
Jones and Jeff Kober, founders of World Class Benchmarking, write that
the pathways to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are governed
by the following elements (see Figure Good Bad 3, next page):
Quality consultant Stuart Weisbrod, a certified Six Sigma
Black
Belt, writes that when corporate cultures are degraded by repetitive
cost-cutting cycles, the quality of products is affected and customer
satisfaction inevitably deteriorates. Over recent years, there have
been significant lapses in quality that have cost lives, had a role in
environmental disasters, or led to massive product recalls. The
following warning signs are indicators of potential changes in
corporate attitudes towards quality.
- Repeated
cost-cutting cycles. When corporate cultures are degraded through one
cost-cutting cycle after another, quality will eventually be affected,
particularly if cutting costs short-circuits quality improvement
activities. Organisations with well-trained staff can usually manage a
certain amount of cost cutting without having a negative impact on
quality. This is not true, however, when cost-cutting cycles become a
primary strategy for meeting corporate goals or for achieving
ever-increasing profit margins.
- Operational signals being
ignored or delayed. When employees develop a mind-set that allows them
to ignore significant operational signals (or delay their responses to
these signals), there may be severe ramifications for customers and
employees alike. Organisations need to develop effective quality
operating systems in order to know when equipment—or a mine, or an oil
well—should be shut down.
- Aging equipment or degradation of maintenance services. In
order
to remain competitive, organisations must be able to understand how
they can extract the most from their plant and equipment. In this
regard, the availability of internal or external service resources is
important to minimize down time, particularly for highly capitalised
equipment. In costcutting environments, there is a temptation to not
upgrade older equipment and to neglect requirements for optimal
equipment performance. Maintenance personnel and service contracts may
even be eliminated. However, this is counterproductive; as equipment
gets older, more resources are often required to achieve optimum
performance levels.
- Direct cuts to quality or to operational
excellence personnel. The number of quality or operational excellence
personnel employed is a direct measure of a company’s commitment to its
quality programmes. Such personnel establish and monitor projects that
drive the continuous improvements or breakthrough improvements that are
needed for organisational success.
- Elimination or outsourcing
of customer assistance resources. Satisfied customers are the key to
successful organisations. Every organisation has to deal with
situations where products are defective or fail to meet customer
expectations. If organisations only focus on improving profit margins,
they may be tempted to reduce the number of personnel working in
customer complaint-related positions. If such cuts are contemplated,
they should be part of ongoing customer service improvements and use
appropriate processes such as Six Sigma’s DMAIC
(Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control) cycle. An efficient customer
service process does not necessarily need more people.
In
summary, Weisbrod recommends that organisations should highlight
significant projects having the potential to drive customer
satisfaction while at the same time lowering costs. Sufficient
resources should be provided to ensure the success of these projects.
Employees should be trained in the principles of Lean, Six Sigma and
Total Quality Management, while working with suppliers to provide the
highest quality materials for use in the organisation’s manufacturing
or service environment. These steps will lead to improved
profitability, a safer work environment, and the highest quality
products and services. In turn, these will inevitably lead to improved
customer satisfaction. [3]
Customer
Satisfaction Surveys
Tim Sullivan, a director at Touchstone Energy Cooperatives,
and Henry Cano, senior principal of the National Rural Electric
Cooperative Association’s National Consulting Group (both in the United
States), write that customer satisfaction measures in themselves do not
make an organisation good or bad. Customer satisfaction measures simply
provide an indication of consumer satisfaction at a given moment in
time. The key value of customer satisfaction surveys lies in the
changes and improvements that are made as a result of the information
gathered. By asking the same customer satisfaction questions year on
year, it is possible to benchmark an organisation’s performance against
its history and objectives. The results of customer satisfaction
surveys should be used to identify areas for improvement, and then to:
-
develop an action plan to
address any identified performance gaps
-
request, evaluate, and act on
employee recommendations for improvement
-
communicate and execute the
plan, and hold people accountable for results
-
set specific measures for
each performance objective
-
insist on regular
implementation updates
-
most importantly, publicise
the fact that results will be measured and reported on, and that
everyone—employees, management, and directors—will be held accountable
for these results. [4]
Writing in Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine, Brendan Read argues
that to succeed, organisations have to deliver the products and
services that customers want, and have the right mix of features,
price, quality, and availability. To achieve this, surveys are commonly
used to gather vital customer feedback. Sophisticated Enterprise
Feedback Management (EFM) software enables organisations to centrally
manage the creation, deployment, and analysis of surveys. According to
Jim Davies, research director of Gartner, a leading information
technology research and advisory company in the United States, EFM is a
costeffective tool that allows correlation between different surveys;
this facilitates better coordination and avoids bombarding customers
with an excessive number of surveys. EFM is also able to tap into
unstructured data such as that found on social media sites. Predictive
analytics can applied to this survey data to gain an understanding of
what customers are likely to purchase in the future. [5]
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