Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

How Happy are Your Customers? Find out!

Have you ever wondered what your customers think about you or how to better communicate to them? It may be time to think about doing a customers satisfaction assessment (CSA).

Some small or medium sized companies as well as divisions of larger organizations who consider a customer satisfaction assessment (CSA) program say, “We’re not ready for it yet!” These organizations often have a relatively small number of customers. They believe they are close to their customers, and they will probably need a formal CSA program when they can no longer easily touch base with each customer. It is unclear when this point will occur. A small or medium sized company or organization early in its growth and development can benefit from a cost-effective, Internet-based customer satisfaction assessment (CSA) program.

Customer focused culture

There is little argument today about the benefits of having a customer-focused culture to an organization’s current and future success. The development of a customer-focused culture starts at the very beginning and is difficult and expensive to develop if an organization’s culture has been established without it.Many small and medium sized organizations feel that because they have a relatively small number of customers they, almost by definition, understand their customers and are customer-focused. However, the understanding of the customer in this situation tends to be very project and account focused, i.e. sales focused. This leads to an almost complete orientation to tactical and operational issues at the expense of strategic and long-term issues. And because the dialogue with the customer tends to be around the account and sale, it usually doesn’t explore and uncover problem areas that the customer has not explicitly identified. It is often anecdotal in nature.

Starting an independent and objective CSA study early in an organization’s life helps establish a customer-focused culture and provides customer-based strategic information to help guide the investment of the organization’s scarce resources in strategic areas important to customers as well as the company’s future.

Understanding the competition

It is crucial to a small or medium sized organization’s future to understand the competition and how customers view them and the competition. It is fairly easy to understand a competitor’s current products. It is not so straightforward to understand

- Customers’ view of the competition

- Their current use of the competitors’ products

- Their plans to use the competitors’ products in the future

- How the organization’s products compare to the competitions’ products in criteria most important to customers

This kind of information does not typically come out of operational and anecdotal communications with the customer. Not having valid, customer-based information in this area can doom the future plans of a small or medium sized company as well as a division of a larger organization.

Meeting and Exceeding Customer Expectations

It is easy for a small or medium sized organization to determine a customer’s program or project needs. These tend to be very product and service specific, and they are often documented in a purchase specification. They are usually in the comfort zone of the supplier.However, it is not so easy to determine what factors are important to customers for a successful supplier relationship or what their expectations are for a product or service over the long term. Determining what the important supplier and product issues are and how well the company is meeting or exceeding customer expectations in these areas are best determined using an independent and objective method. These findings are very important to small or medium sized organizations

Fixing Problems

Fixing problems in an operational, tactical environment is easy. Often the customer with the loudest complaint gets serviced first, then the next loudest, etc. This is reinforced by the size of the order and account. This usually works until it comes to developing, enhancing, or fixing an organization’s business systems and strategies. Then, the absence of customer-based, factual information can cause an organization to make key decisions subjectively based on anecdotal information rather than objective findings from a CSA.

What are the Benefits?

- Assurance that the organization meets or exceeds the expectations of key customers

- Confidence that they are better than or equal to their competition based on criteria important to customers

- The ability to take cost-effective corrective actions to enhance products, services, and market position based on objective customer findings

- The ability to refine business and product strategies based on changing customer needs, requirements, and expectations

- Satisfaction of a quality system’s requirements for customer benchmarking

Time and Money

At the end of the day, the real issue with an organization that considers a customer satisfaction assessment study isn’t “we’re not ready for it yet!” or even “we don’t need it yet!” The real issues are time and secondarily money.

But these are the real benefits of an independent and objective CSA study. Besides providing needed customer information, a formal study relieves a small or medium sized organization’s staff from the burden of developing and conducting a state-of-the-art customer study. And the small or medium sized organization gets the added benefit of years of industry experience as the CSA study results are summarized and analyzed.

At the end it comes down to money. An Internet-based customer satisfaction assessment (CSA) program is very cost effective compared to traditional methods because it is based on WEB technology and therefore has significantly reduced costs in the area of data collection.

Noel is president and founder of Six 9s Associates, Inc., a full service customer research firm. Six 9s delivers actionable intelligence that enables clients to resolve customer problems, add value, and enhance their competitive position.

To find out more about how to start a Customer Satisfaction Assessment program for your organization, contact Six 9s Associates, Inc. at +480.488.7936 or contact@six-9s.com.

 www.six-9s.com

           

Posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Customer Service, Customer Spotlight, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.