Customer-driven business strategy

Many organisations treat customer satisfaction measurement as no more than a form of “marketing intelligence” and fail to capitalise on the opportunity of using it as a management tool to build customers into their business, product and service improvement processes.

For appreciable growth to be achieved, organisations must now, more than ever, strive to retain their best customers and employees, relentlessly discover and fix the problems they experience and find out why their loyalty might be at risk.  Simply put, it’s a matter of building value by “managing quality to the customer’s satisfaction”

Managing quality to the customer's satisfaction

From our work with clients around the world, we have identified five important steps an organisation must take in order to fully exploit these opportunities and build a defence against customer dissatisfaction:

• Start measuring customer satisfaction in financial terms:
  Current threats to customer retention and opportunities for improvement can then be prioritised in terms of their potential influence on strategic outcomes.
• Establish a baseline of customer satisfaction, loyalty and dissatisfaction:
  Problems that customer currently experience doing business with your organisation can be identified and prioritised for remedial action.
• Enhance customer-response and complaint-handling skills, processes and systems:
  Customers who make contact looking for help can then be assured of a consistent and effective response and timely problem resolution.
• Establish a "Learning from Customers" programme:
  Customer experiences can then be tracked on an ongoing basis and recurring failures in service and product quality can be quickly identified and addressed.
• Conduct ongoing tracking of customer satisfaction with key processes:
  Providing an effective ongoing management tool to support the measurement and management of critical customer experiences.

CTMA's consulting and research portfolio is dedicated to helping organisations address these five key areas and help turn customer satisfaction measurement into actions for profit and growth.