“Customer Satisfaction is a business term of how the products and the services supplied by the company meet or surpass the customer expectation. It is the key performance indicator within the business. ” …Berlin Asong
WHY ORGANIZATIONS FOCUS ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?
Businesses monitor customer satisfaction in order to determine how to increase their customer base, customer loyalty, revenue, profits, market share and survival. Although greater profit is the primary driver, exemplary businesses focus on the customer and his/her experience with the organization.
They work to make their customers happy and see customer satisfaction as the key to survival and profit. Customer satisfaction in turn hinges on the quality and effects of their experiences and the goods or services they receive. The most important asset of any organization is its customers. Satisfied customers pay their bills promptly which greatly improves cash flow – the lifeblood of any organization.
BUSINESS TECNIQUES OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
One of the key customer satisfaction techniques is the need to provide front line employees with the ability to respond to customer situations quickly without the need to ‘ask for permission’. Innovation drives customers’ satisfaction. As customers’ needs keep changing, an innovation-driven company is capacitated to exceed customers’ expectations. To provide after sale services. Listen actively and carefully. Anticipate that the customer will be asking questions. They may be easy, they be hard. But encourage them anyway. If you cannot provide an answer, promise to find out the answer from someone who can.
Be patient, look from the customer’s point of view and work from there. This point of view will always give you the best outlook on the situation. Always keep a smile on your face when dealing with customers which can lead to customer satisfaction. This positive attitude can rub off and turn a potentially negative situation into a positive experience.
Customer satisfaction is tied directly to profitability. Well-established research by Bain & Company found that, for many companies, an increase of 5% in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. The same study found that it costs six to seven times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MEASUREMENT
A basic and effective base line customer satisfaction survey program should focus on measuring customer perceptions of how will the company delivers on the critical success factors and dimensions of the business as defined by the customers. Organizations need to retain existing customers while targeting non-customers. Measuring customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing products and/or services to the marketplace.
Customer satisfaction is an abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary depending on other factors the customer, such as other products against which the customer can compare the organization’s products. FOR EXAMPLE: Service Promptness
Courtesy of Staff Responsiveness Understanding the customer problem, etc. The findings of the company performance should be analyzed both with all customers and by key segments of the customer population. The essential starting point for Customer Satisfaction Measurement (CMS) is exploratory research. Since satisfaction is about an organization’s ability. To meet customer requirement one has to start by clarifying with customers exactly what those requirements are. This is done through exploratory research using focus groups or one to one depth interviews.
Two main factors determine the accuracy of CMS. The first is the asking the right question and the second is the asking them to the right people sample of customers which accurately reflects the customer base. Three things decide the accuracy of a sample. They are:
- It must be representative.
- It must be randomly selected.
- It must be adequate enough.
NEED FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
“Customers are too good to lose – Lets keep them happy! “Customer is the king. ” “Marketing starts with the customer and ends the customer”. …Peter Drucker. So no organization, small or big ignores the customers. “Earth is not the center of universe but revolves around the Sun”. …Copernicus. Similarly, we have come to believe that business firm is not the center of economic universe but revolves around the customer.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
About customer satisfaction Customer satisfaction occurs when the experience obtained from transaction match expectation. Customer may forget experience that match expectation although, customers will generally notice and also remember those experience that deviated from expectation. Methodologies
The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano that classifies customer preferences into five categories: Attractive, One-Dimensional, Must-Be, Indifferent, Reverse. The Kano model offers some insight into the product attributes which are perceived to be important to customers. Kano also produced a methodology for mapping consumer responses to questionnaires onto his model.
SERVQUAL or RATER is a service-quality framework that has been incorporated into customer-satisfaction surveys (e. g. , the revised Norwegian Customer Satisfaction Barometer) to indicate the gap between customer expectations and experience. J. D. Power and Associates provides another measure of customer satisfaction, known for its top-box approach and automotive industry rankings. J. D. Power and Associates’ marketing research consists primarily of consumer surveys and is publicly known for the value of its product awards. Other research and consulting firms have customer satisfaction solutions as well. These include A. T. Kearney’s Customer
Satisfaction Audit process, which incorporates the Stages of Excellence framework and which helps define a company’s status against eight critically identified dimensions. For Business to Business (B2B) surveys there is the Info Quest box. This has been used internationally since 1989 on more than 110,000 surveys (Nov ’09) with an average response rate of 72. 74%. The box is targeted at “the most important” customers and avoids the need for a blanket survey.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Research is an art of scientific investigation through search for new facts in any branch of knowledge. It is a moment from known to unknown. Research always starts with a question or a problem. Its purpose is to find answers to questions through the application of the scientific method. It is a systematic and intensive study directed towards a more complete knowledge of the subject studied. “My Research based on Descriptive Research. ” Descriptive research is also called Statistical Research. The main goal of this type of research is to describe the data and characteristics about what is being studied. The idea behind this type of research is to study frequencies, averages, and other statistical calculations.
Although this research is highly accurate, it does not gather the causes behind a situation. Descriptive research is mainly done when a researcher wants to gain a better understanding of a topic for example, a frozen ready meals company learns that there is a growing demand for fresh ready meals but doesn’t know much about the area of fresh food and so has to carry out research in order to gain a better understanding. It is quantitative and uses surveys and panels and also the use of probability sampling.
