TRACKING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

1、For many companies, customer satisfaction is both a goal and a major factor in company success. Tools for tracking and measuring customer satisfaction range from the primitive to the sophisticated. Companies use the following methods to measure how much customer satisfaction they are creating.A cust

2、omer-centered organization makes it easy for customers to make suggestions or complaints. Restaurants and hotels provide forms on which guests can check off their likes and dislikes. Hospitals place suggestion boxes in the corridors, supply comment cards to exiting patients, and employ patient advoc

3、ates to solicit grievances. Some customer-centered companies, such as P&G, General Electric, and Whirlpool, set up customer hotlines with 800 numbers to make it easy for customers to inquire, suggest, or complain. Such systems not only help companies to act more quickly to resolve problems, they als

4、o provide companies with many good ideas for improved products and service.Simply running complaint and suggestion systems may not give the company a full picture of customer satisfaction and satisfaction. Studies show that one of every four purchases results in consumer dissatisfaction , but that l

5、ess than 5 percent of dissatisfied customers bother to complainmost customers simply switch suppliers. As a result, the company needlessly loses customers.Responsive companies take direct measures of customer satisfaction by conducting regular surveys. They send questionnaires or make telephone call

6、s to a sample of recent customers to find out how they feel about various aspects of the companys performance. They also survey buyers views on competitor performance. Whirlpool surveys customer satisfaction on a massive scale, then acts on the results:When customers talk, Whirlpool listens. Each ye

7、ar the company mails its Standardized Appliance Measurement of Satisfaction(SAMS) survey to 180,000 households, asking people to rate all its appliance on dozens of attributes. When a competitors product rankers higher, Whirlpool engineers rip it apart to see why. The company also pays hundreds of c

8、onsumers to fiddle with computer-simulated products at the companys Usability Lab while engineers record the users reactions on videotapeA company can measure customer satisfaction in a number of ways. It can measure satisfaction directly by asking: “How satisfied are you with this product? Are you

9、highly dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, somewhat satisfied, or highly satisfied? ” Or it can ask respondents to rate how much they expected of certain attributes and how much they actually experienced. Finally, the company can ask respondents to list any probl

10、ems they have had with the offer and to suggest improvements.While collecting customer satisfaction data, companies often ask additional useful questions. They often measure the customers repurchase intention; this will usually be high if customer satisfaction is high. According to CEO John Young at

11、e Hewlett-Packard, nine out of ten customers in H-P surveys who rank themselves as highly satisfied say they would definitely or probably buy from H-P again. The company also might ask about the customers likelihood or willingness to recommend the company and brand to other people. A strongly positi

12、ve word-of-mouth rating suggests high customer satisfaction.Another useful way of assessing customer satisfaction is to hire people to pose as buyers to report their experiences in buying the companys and competitors products. These “ghost shoppers” can even present specific problems to test whether

13、 the companys personnel handle difficult situations well. For example, ghost shoppers can complain about a restaurants food to see how the restaurant handles this complaint. Not only should companies hire ghost shoppers, but managers themselves should leave their offices from time to time and experi

14、ence first-hand the treatment they receive as “customers.”Companies should contact customers who have stopped buying, or those who have switched to a competitor, to learn why this happened. When IBM loses a customer, it mounts a thorough effort to learn how it failed: Was IBMs prce too high, its ser

15、vice poor, or its products substandard? Not only should the company conduct such exit interviews, it should also monitor the customer loss rate. Arising loss rate indicates that the company is failing to satisfy its customers.Customer satisfaction ratings are sometimes difficult to interpret. When c

16、ustomers rate their satisfaction with some element of the companys performance, say delivery, they can vary greatly in how they define good delivery. It might mean early delivery, on-time delivery order completeness, or something else. Yet, if the company tried to define every element in detail, cus

17、tomers would face a huge questionnaire.Companies also must recognize that two customers can report being “highly satisfied” for different reasons. One might beeasily satisfied most of the time, whereas the other might be hard to please but was pleased on this occasion. Further, managers and salespeople can manipulate their ratings on customer satisfaction. They can be especially nice to customers just before the surve