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How two companies measure customer satisfaction levels
Measuring customer satisfaction is an important part of staying ahead of the your competitors. If an organisation only views the financial side of business (i.e. value of sales orders placed), it may not notice until too late that it has been overtaken by its competitors. The two examples that follow are taken from sales training case studies and they illustrate how an effective system can be established to measure actual client satisfaction.
In Company “A” surveys were carried out of all clients and employees. The results showed up clear deficiencies. The issue was that no one in the company was in overall charge of all matters relating to customers. Each employee dealt with a narrow area, such as logging the order, service, the warehouse, dispatch or invoicing.
If, for example, a customer wanted to know how far advanced their order was, they would be passed from department to department when they phoned the company. This would often lead to long delays in order processing, which, in turn, would antagonise the customer.
To remedy this, company “A” created a new ‘customer satisfaction’ department with its own director. This department was directly responsible to the customer for all stages involved in processing their orders, from initial advice to logging the order, fixing delivery time to actual delivery, invoicing and credit related matters.
In order to ensure that the customer satisfaction department was kept abreast of current trends and developments, information regarding the entire sales department and the dealers working with the department were put on-line.
Client satisfaction in company “A” was assessed on the basis of some clearly defined criteria:
Average time taken to process an order
Average time to react to a customer’s request for information or an objection/complaint
The accuracy of information supplied to customers
Number and Percentage of deliveries including the wrong parts
Achieving the agreed delivery time
Number and Percentage of misdirected deliveries
Company “B” provides another example. It has a customer satisfaction process based on three principles: communication, cooperation and advice. The executive board has direct control over the customer satisfaction department. The department is tasked with constantly checking client satisfaction and informing the board of the results.
The company has 50 highly qualified tele-advisers within their customer assistance centre who answer in the region of 1,500 client calls a day on a service extension. By establishing this customer assistance centre, company “B” has managed to reduce the average amount of time it takes to handle a client complaint from 27 to less than 6 days.
Customer satisfaction in company “B” is tested with two different instruments:
The new sales and delivery survey measures satisfaction of delivery to new customers
The service survey measures satisfaction in existing customers using the repair centres. Every customer is asked the following questions within 20 days of using the company B’s network of repair centres.
Did you get the best advice?
Were the repairs done within the agreed time?
How satisfied were you with the service you received from the repair centre?
Would you recommend the repair centre?
Every repair centre records the parts that were needed for the repair work, the date of the repair and the fitter’s name. The repaired items are registered according to serial numbers, in this way company management is kept informed. The information allows management to determine exactly which problems are arising in which centres, which manufacturing techniques are causing an above-average number of issues and which service fitters are not sufficiently qualified.
The customer satisfaction department circulates a ‘problem workshop list’ at regular intervals. This lists the one hundred worst centres, those with the highest complaint rates. If a repair centre appears on the list and does not rectify the situation, then the customer satisfaction department is empowered to terminate contract with that particular repair centre. Particularly good repair centres, on the other hand, are commended publicly with the number one repair centre receiving the ‘President’s award’.
Some businesses believe that provided their products are selling well, then their clients are satisfied. This attitude is a dangerous one. Ensuring your staff are trained to deliver the highest levels of service, so your clients are really satisfied (and measuring this accurately) is just as important as focusing on increasing selling skills with sales training.
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