EFFECTIVENESS

When companies review their effectiveness, they have the choice of looking inward to measure their internal effectiveness based on its ability to achieve their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or outward to use their customer’s feedback as a measure of effectiveness. Internal looks are usually focused on internal communication, improving workflows and growing the business. The outward look involves getting feedback from customers about on-time delivery, customer satisfaction and product working “as advertised”. Both views are important, however, the customer view is more directly correlated with the customer experience. After all, each customer purchase is a vote of confidence for your product and ultimately determines your market share and ability to grow. This article will address the customer point of view when it comes to effectiveness since it is more closely tied to the customer needs.

DO WHAT YOU SAY

Based on having run a number of customer satisfaction surveys over many years, meeting the customers’ needs boils down to just a few items. We’ll touch on these and connect the customers’ needs with the company needs. All of your marketing material, content, specifications and descriptions of your products and services amounts to a promise of what you will deliver. Make sure the message you are sending is consistent with product or service. Your first real chance to impress a new customer is to deliver what you promise in terms of performance – whatever that may be. Smart companies ensure their success in this critical arena, by ensuring their products meet or exceed their specifications.

TIMELINESS

Assuming you have a solid product or service that meets or exceeds the customer expectations, the next most important thing you can do is deliver the product within the promised lead time. Aside from any product performance issue, this is the number one nuisance item that can absolutely kill a relationship. In most cases your product or service is part of a value chain and once the decision has been made by a new customer to add your product into their supply chain, product or process, they have also established an expectation for delivery. Remember if you are delayed even one day, the purchasing agent has probably had to field calls from his customer, the head of purchasing and you as a representative of your company. If you deliver late twice within a short period of time, you can bet that the purchasing agent is open to changing vendors. Most companies have a policy that they will accept early deliveries of product, but you should make sure and know what that is. Delivering too early can create issues as well so you want to be sure you know their policy so you don’t deliver too early and get penalized for that.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

There are a lot of ways to elicit an ongoing dialog around customer satisfaction. The “bad news” is if you are doing a good job you won’t hear much from your customers. The silver lining is if you have a dissatisfied customer, they usually will contact you through the sales department or technical support, giving you a chance to turn them into a happy customer.

I’ll assume that you already have a procedure to handle an unhappy customer. Once you have taken care of their needs, in order to build a world class customer satisfaction operation you need to do one more thing: find out from that interaction, what leads to a happy outcome. A typical success formula goes something like this.:

• When the customer is put on hold, the hold time is 30 seconds or less.
• After taking down contact information, you listen and ask questions until you thoroughly understand the issues.
• Based on your understanding, offer up a solution that addresses those issues.
• Finally, confirm your proposal and ask if there is anything that could have gone better on the call.

You might come up with a slightly different flow, but these four factors are pretty common. You can interview customers that have had interactions with your CSR (Customer Satisfaction Representative) team recently to make a more custom list. Limit the list to five factors. That’s the point at which a person’s focus starts to drift.

It’s easy to turn your specific list into a table to make it easier to provide a consistent level of service. You can get a little more out of the interaction by leaving space to indicate how well each step went. Maybe you took a couple of minutes to answer the call, so you check the box “below expectations” for that activity. Asking the questions and recording the answers will keep you in touch with your customer base.

It’s a competitive world and customer expectations are high. To be successful it is important to provide consistent, quality product, delivered on time and backed with a dedicated service attitude. Just what we would all like, and expect in our lives.

Small Business Resources welcomes questions from inquiring minds looking to improve their business outcomes using best business practices combined with available technologies. Submit any questions you would like us to explore on your behalf to contact@sbresources.com.