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