Are the results of your customer satisfaction programmes truly understood by your whole business and effectively used to inform strategy and drive business performance?
And is customer satisfaction management embedded at the heart of your business?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, and your customer satisfaction surveys are just a tick box measurement in your organisation, you’re not alone. Overcoming the barriers to changing how you manage such research programmes isn’t easy. But it is a challenge worth rising to. There are many benefits to be achieved from really embedding customer satisfaction – that’s internal as well as external stakeholders’ input – at the heart of your business including:
- A real understanding of what drives stakeholder perception
- Knowledge of where to focus activities to address issues and improve satisfaction
- An understanding of where spending budget has the greatest impact – and the ability to identify efficiencies and cost-savings
- Greater buy-in
- Consistency in action plans across the business.
We’ve been working in partnership with Mars for the past five years on its global internal IT customer satisfaction programme, but two years ago we were tasked with fundamentally changing the programme to provide more meaningful measurement into its business. In June this year we shared the story of our journey at the Confirmit Community Conference.
Before we did anything we focused on understanding what the business really needed and where we wanted to be. The process focused heavily on delivering value at every stage and fundamentally transforming the approach to measurement from an exercise into an action-oriented ‘habit’ across the business. Understanding where your organisation’s programme fits on this journey is the first step towards making customer satisfaction a habit.
- Stage one – Unaware, where a C-Sat survey is a tick box exercise with few or no action plans
- Stage two – Understanding where there is awareness of issues, but action plans for handling them are inconsistent
- Stage three – Competent, where awareness exists of the key drivers of dissatisfaction and action plans for managing them are consistent
- Stage four – Habit, where everyone knows their satisfaction score and maintains dynamic action plans.
To find out where your organisation is on our scale or to learn how we can help you move from measurement to an ongoing change and improvement programme, simply get in touch with us.