Customer Satisfaction Assessment Practice

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important indicators to watch if you're in charge of marketing for an organization. This post outlines some of what I've learned about how to assess customer satisfaction and bring the voice of your customer into your organization. I'll start with an overview of what a customer service assessment program looks like, then I'll talk about how it relates to consumer generated media, why marketers are well positioned to do this work, some key assessment metrics, how to make research actionable, and finally how to put together a customer satisfaction strategy. If you're already familiar with the background, I suggest jumping down to the strategy section.

Before I start in, It's important to remember that keeping existing customers usually offers a greater return than trying to acquire new ones. Plus, it turns out that satisfying existing customers is often the best way to acquire new ones because of the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing. In order to improve customer satisfaction, you have to develop a strong practice for listening to customers.

A Continuous Practice

As the section head suggests, listening to customers is not something that you can budget for in the first quarter of the year and then cross off your list. This is an ongoing practice that must be supported accordingly. Recent studies that show that "customer experience" is increasingly becoming the most important driver of competitive advantage ( National Retail Federation , Customer Experience Maturity Monitor ) so this is an essential investment core to the marketing function.

One of the challenges associated with developing a continuous practice is that there are usually existing customer satisfaction assessment programs in place within each organizational silo. This means that customers may be asked the same, or similar, questions from different groups within your organization. Plus, research results may not be shared or available as a resource. This erodes an organization's credibility by making it appear disorganized, frustrates customers by repeating questions, and ultimately reduces response rates.

The best way to tackle this is to integrate your customer satisfaction practices with your customer relationship management tool (CRM). I talk about CRMs in detail in my earlier post here . This makes doing research easier because you can approach research subjects with a 360º view of their experience with your company (i.e. you'll know if they participated in past research, what products/services they use, if they receive your newsletter, etc). When you demonstrate that you know something about a research subjects before asking them a question, you appear smarter. This, in turn, leads to better engagement.

Consumer Generated Media (CGM)

CGM is an important channel for understanding customers satisfaction and sentiment with regard to your organization. This is one area, however, that it is harder to manage with a CRM. Instead, it's important to use CGM as a parallel input into your assessment program.

There are excellent third party tools available for doing this, such as Get Satisfaction, and FixYa. Alternatively, you can offer these services through your own site. Either way, it's important to keep your eye on consumer generated media because it can be the most cost effective way to listen to your community and manage satisfaction issues. Many issues simply bubble up from the community and don't require formal research. Most importantly, it's a dialogue, which means you have to share your research outcomes and intervention plans with the community. By doing so, you return value and increase the likelihood of ongoing participation. I've written about The Value of User Generated Content here.

Marketing Amplifies The Voice Of The Customer

It is my belief that the marketing staff is best positioned to serve as the voice of the customer within an organization. This is partially because marketers are often the most objective stakeholders when it comes to customer experience. While marketers may have helped develop the product/service, they don't have the biases of the development team. And, while they may have helped sell the product by supporting the sales team, they are not compensated directly on sales as the sales team is.

Marketing teams are also well positioned to coordinate the needs of different organizational silos. Marketing supports sales, so they understand what the sales team would like to know from/about customers. Marketers also work with development teams and often help facilitate the research they conduct. Plus, marketing should run knowledge management through organizational CRM tools, so marketers are set up to transform research into a resource for everyone else. In many cases, they also have the most experience doing such research and can ensure that relevant questions are being asked in the right way. This is essential to tying research back to a customer satisfaction strategy and the actionable interventions that support it. [more>>]