Customer Satisfaction and Quality - 10 tips to being a leader in your own growth.
By Kordell Norton, ©Copyright 2007 – all rights reserved
“Market share my foot. I don’t want to share my market with anyone.”
How can you strive toward Customer Satisfaction if you don’t know what they, the customer, would consider quality and value?
Steps to making the customers a partner in your business.
Listen to what they say. Duh! With the speed of change today and the fractured and numerous interests and demands, you have to got to talk to your customer. Why? 51 Flavors my foot. With the market now global and tools to connect with the customers financial votes so many, you have to be closer to what the customer thinks.
- One researcher found that asking the customer how they “feel” is a better predictor of the future relationship than with numeric surveys. If your current customer feedback has the traditional “smiley face” J rating system (“On a scale of 1 to 10 rate your satisfaction with . . . “) mend your ways. Your feedback form will need to have space after each question for the customer to write. If someone is verbally surveying the customer, watch out for scripts that channel the customer through what you think they should tell you. Use an outside group to help you if you need to. Create your own questionnaire. Discover the power of the 90 Second Audit (see www.KordellNorton.com). What ever you do, start developing your feedback gathering and realize that you may need to tweak it initially.
- Figure out what a how much your top 20% of customers are worth to you over a two or three year time period. If you don’t know you will need to slow down to find this out. How can you quantify the value of keeping a customer, or growing new ones if you don’t know their value?
- Pay them to get their time and attention if you need to. A reward of the proper level might be appropriate. Some of your customers may have policies against receiving anything of value from you. But careful thought should show you ways that you could reward them for their input with out paying them, or rewarding them with gift or money. It may be as simple as letting them know they are part of a process to get feedback from a select group of “our most valued customers”.
- Do you have a suggestion box? Why not? If you ship product to the customer is there a “how are we doing?” feedback card inside? Does a feedback form go into the bag of goods the customer leaves with? How does this information get collected and provided to upper management? Is a review of this information a scheduled part of managements calendar? If not, do not pass GO and do not collect $200.
- Find out if the customer feels your value and/or your quality has been improving or going down over the last year.
- Conduct an Account Review Session with your top customers (for those with commercial or industrial clients). See the steps on www.KordellNorton.com
- Ask the customer about loyalty. What would it take for a competitive influence to move them away from you and your value?
- Call or meet with 7 to 12 clients you lost in the year and find out why? This is not a “let’s get them back” exercise. This is a harsh reality visit to what is broken and what you need to work on. The cost of getting new customers is so large that it makes losing customers for what ever reason a serious necessity for getting customer feed back.
- Sales input. Your sales representatives are talking to customers each day. Do you have a way of collecting this information? If you look past the fact that these sales people are an important tool for gathering customer insights, then you are throwing their wages down the drain. You should be able to look past the personal agendas that might exist in the information. Collecting sales representatives insights will allow you to have a pulse on your business. Consider some numerical measurements (this is where you might WANT to have some smiley face measurables IN ADDITION the other insights you gather from the sales people.
- Print this page out and under this last point, write down what steps, programs, initiatives you are taking to gather the customer information.
About Kordell Norton - The Top Line Guy
Your organization has a strong interest in the "top line" for growth. As a consultant, speaker, author, Kordell Norton works with corporate, association, education and government organizations who want to focus on branding, sales, marketing, strategic planning/leadership, team building, and customer service.
Kordell was an executive with several multi-billion dollar corporations with executive suite positions in sales, HR, marketing and call centers. As a certified Graphic Facilitator, he uses highly visual processes, along with humor, and entertaining methods for powerful, high energy presentations.
Author of Throwing Gas on the Fire - creating drastic change in Sales and Marketing
He can be reached at (330) 405-1950 or at kordell@kordellnorton.com or at his website - www.KordellNorton.com