Strategies for building a customer-driven enterprise
By Paul Linnell
Largely due to an understandable discomfort handling angry customers, and the
widespread absence of corporate financial metrics quantifying customer
dissatisfaction, many organisations regard customer feedback and complaints as an “inconvenience” - and customer satisfaction research as no more than a form of
cosmetic “marketing intelligence”.
In doing so, they fail to capitalise on the opportunity of using customer feedback as a management tool to improve their products, their services, their businesses
and the value they bring their customers. This is a problem that
CTMA solves for businesses and public sector organisations alike.
Turning feedback into management actions
By adopting a systematic approach to customer experience feedback an organisation can turn customer feedback into management actions, build an effective force against service management challenges and a defence against customer dissatisfaction.
CTMA has identified six important steps an organisation must take to fully exploit these opportunities:
- Start measuring customer satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in
financial terms:
This lets the organisation prioritise current threats, to customer retention, positive referrals, and opportunities for improvement, in terms of their potential influence on the financial and strategic outcomes to their business.
- Establish a customer experience baseline of satisfaction, loyalty & dissatisfaction: A customer experience baseline helps you identify the problems that customer currently experience doing business with your organisation and prioritise them for remedial action.
- Improve customer-response and complaint-handling skills, processes and systems:
Customers who make contact looking for help can then be assured of a consistent and effective response and timely problem resolution. An effective response can improve customer loyalty and advocacy.
- Increase feedback from customers by making it easier for them to contact you:
This, combined with improved customer response, increases the number of dissatisfied customers your organisation can turn into satisfied customers, reduces your potential negative reputation and increases the amount of data available for preventive analysis.
- Establish a formal "Learning from Customers Programme":
Customer experiences can then be monitored on an ongoing basis and recurring failures in service and product quality can be quickly identified and addressed.
- Conduct ongoing tracking of customer satisfaction with key processes:
A systematic approach to satisfaction tracking provides the organisation with an effective ongoing management tool to support the management of critical customer experiences.
Ways we can help
CTMA’s portfolio of consulting and research services is dedicated to helping organisations address these six key areas and help turn customer feedback and customer satisfaction measurement into management actions.
Let’s talk
If there’s a specific customer strategy we
can help you deliver and you’d like to meet for a discussion, in person, or
by phone, or via Skype, please let us know. We would be delighted to
learn more and explore ways we can help.
Please
contact us to schedule some time for an
introductory discussion.
