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Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Customer Satisfaction

Organization focusing on customer support mostly focuses on Customer Satisfaction (customer loyalty, competitive advantage, etc.), which can be achieved by various types of survey, follow-up action & industry benchmarking.

Survey Method -
To get the customer satisfaction data, one can use data fetched from following surveys -


- Relationship Surveys:
Provides first impression of customer’s attitude towards a vendor.
o At least has to be performed once a year.
o Below average response rate of a relationship survey indicates
o  Deteriorating relation with customers.
o  Company’s follow up action plan is poor.
o  Bad survey design (irrelevant questions for a good score)
o Mostly performed for expensive, support intensive products/services.
o Predicts company’s overall reputation rather than actual performance.


- Transaction Surveys:
It provides each and every service delivery (support incidents) / specific products / individual support representatives performance.
o It’s a good methodology to measure employee performance / product performance than overall performance.
o This methodology cannot be used for overall performance


- Website Surveys:
This kind of survey is usually carried out for various support related sites or simply a website. It’s either done site as a whole or on an individual articles, which can even be drill down to specific contributors or individual entries.


Follow up Action -
Follow up makes sure that the support team performs an immediate remedial (tangible) action. It can be performed by following methods –


- Take Action:
With a low survey response, use an automated tracking system to inform the organization hierarchy about the action taken with their response time from the line managers to operational managers.


- Maintain Live contacts:
Maintain telephone numbers of unsatisfied customers for verbal contacts.


- Investigate the Reason:
With complex businesses, users cannot just drill down to problems using a simple flow chart. People have to be trained to investigate the reasons through a cause-effect examination.


- Stay Focused:
Information can be collected for a variety of metrics, but still people have to be focus on the key mission metrics.


- Safeguard Survey errors:
Survey errors have to be rectified as soon as it’s observed, to further reduce the errors caused by survey. Make use of close ended questions than open ended questions for accurate response.


- Examine successes:
Highly satisfied customers provide factors as per customer’s point of view.


- Transfer Information:
Inform product managers and support representatives about the whole survey process and the final outcome, so they can provide improvements within their own process.


Industry Benchmarking -
This is usually the most difficult task of comparing results between various companies in the same industry as their scoring methodology is usually different. There is no apple to apple comparison but usually an overall comparison is more effective. Companies hire mostly outside large firms for accurate benchmarking comparisons. Individuals can also be hired to conduct competitive analysis.

Industry Benchmarking can be usually done with more than 2 companies and it’s a meaningful effort if the same set of questions is asked along with the same methodology.

Customer Satisfaction

Organization focusing on customer support mostly focuses on Customer Satisfaction (customer loyalty, competitive advantage, etc.), which can be achieved by various types of survey, follow-up action & industry benchmarking.

Blog :: Customer Satisfaction