How To Design An Actionable Customer Satisfaction Program

The following is a structured process to deliver a successful customer satisfaction program to companies in the b2b environment. This is meant as a supplement not a replacement for using the Net Promoter Score. The Net Promoter Score measures loyalty across transactions and time with the organization. Customer satisfaction is about transactions like quality, service, delivery and is part of a diagnostic toolbox which explains the score and how to improve the Net Promoter Score.

Step One: Discuss the Internal Perception of Strengths and Weaknesses

The objective in this phase is to identify areas that the customer thinks are important, and areas where we are strong as well as areas where we are weak. The secondary objective is to get buy in and commitment from the C level in order to give this initiative a higher probability of success.

Step Two: Customer Discovery Process

This step is to validate the management team’s perceptions with respect to:

• What are the key selection criteria?
• Areas of strength
• Areas of weaknesses

Step Three: Execute the Customer Interviews

In the b2b world there is almost always an 80/20 rule, 20% of the customers have 80% of the volume. So if a company has 100 customers, it is critically important to determine how the company is doing in each of the 20 major customers. We find it to be effective and efficient to use in-depth phone interviews with the decision makers and influencers of each of these key customers. The 20 accounts could become 45 interviews.

There should be a good mix of qualitative and quantitative questions. There should be a lot of “why did you give that scoring” as well as general overall qualitative questions like:

• What are their strengths?
• What are their weaknesses?
• What is the one area they need to improve the most?
• What is their competition doing, that they should be doing?

Determine Importance of Each Rating Criteria

On quantitative questions, one needs to ask the importance of the issue. Why fix something and waste money on something that the customer could care less about?

This can range from adding to 100%, ranking, or having them rate the importance on a 1 to 10 scale where 1 is not important, and 10 is very important.

Assess Performance of the Company

Example for delivery on a 1 to 10 scale, how well did the client do over a twelve month period? For scores less than 6, ask them detail why the low score and what could be done to improve the score. Get as tactical as possible with them describing examples.

Benchmark the Competition

It is important to determine how well the competitors used in the account are doing to determine if we are doing better, the same or worse.

We also recommend writing up the phone interviews as transcripts to give to the marketing and sales teams. This can be used to review prior going back to the account to deliver the feedback which will be addressed later.

Step Four: Have management take the survey from the customer perspective.

Take the same questions used for the customer surveys (or a subset of them) and have the management rate their performance on an e-survey where each person does the survey alone without any group think. A way to phrase this is ask them, say on quality, “If 100 customers rated you on quality, what score would they give you as an average?”

This allows you to determine if there is a significant disconnect/misalignment between what customers think and what management thinks. Ideally, management should either be the same as customers or slightly harsher as they see all the operational issues that the customers might not see.

Step Five: Analyze and Present the Data

It is important to give both the rating feedback as well as provide insightful commentary as to why those scores were given.

The major issues are:

• What areas do the customers think are critical?
• How well do we do?
• Where do we need to improve?
• What is the degree of alignment with management’s perceptions?

What are the top three to five things needed to increase our satisfaction and loyalty with these major accounts?

Step Six: Design Implementation Initiatives Addressing the Top 3 to 5 Issues

·       Who is the executive sponsor for each initiative?

·       What resources are needed?

·       What is the timeframe, the milestones?

This is basic project management process where you meet to determine progress, and what it takes to deliver the outcome in the desired time frame.

Doing this makes the customer satisfaction initiative an investment, not just a cost.

Step Seven: Close the Feedback Loop

We strongly recommend going back to the customers surveyed with a team that includes someone form the senior management team and report back to them.

• Here is what we heard from you (without being defensive)
• Here is what we will address
• Here is our timeline for getting this done
• We will meet once every six months to review our progress

Surprisingly, this step is frequently ignored.

Step Eight: Relaunch the process 18 months out to determine the progress or lack of progress made.

Like product quality, this is a continuing process.

If you would like to understand how Consight Marketing Group can work with you regarding customer satisfaction/loyalty or other marketing issues in the b2b setting, please contact Alan Hale at: 847.800.1685 or email at [email protected]. Please visit our website: www.consightmarketinggroup.com to download white papers and read our blog.