In our last blog on measuring the key drivers of client, stakeholder and employee satisfaction we looked at assigning a relative importance value to the key drivers of customer satisfaction.
Prioritising the key drivers of customer satisfaction
We also talked about the importance of understanding your performance in each area so that you can focus greatest effort where importance is highest and satisfaction is lowest.
What you are looking to produce is a priority matrix to guide your decision-making and actions. The first thing you need to do is to understand what is important to your customers, and to look at this in relation to current performance. This will help you to plot priorities.
A prioritisation matrix is divided into four sections of differing priority:
Primary Focus: areas that are important, but that you are performing badly in. Improvements here will have the greatest impact on driving satisfaction.
Secondary Focus: areas that are important, but that you are already performing fairly well in. Still an important area to apply resource to, however, improvements here have less impact on overall satisfaction than primary ones.
Less Priority: your performance is below average, but these factors have less influence on overall satisfaction.
Maintain: you are performing well in these areas, but they are of lower importance. Maintain effort, but concentrate resources on those factors in the Primary Focus quadrant.
Whilst the matrix grid lines are used to define quadrants, realistically these are not ‘absolutes’ and should be used as a ‘guide’ to prioritisation.
Once you have identified and prioritised the broad key drivers – i.e. those at a macro level – in this way, the next step is to drill down into each of these to unearth another level of understanding. We will be looking into this in greater depth in our next blog post.