Listen to your customers, listen to your employees, and align those customer desires with employee actions through a powerful integrated approach that:
- Understands what customers value and what employees do to impact that
- Engages employees in planning and implementing improvements
- Rewards and recognizes employees for improvements
Sounds simple, right? But when I ask anyone in the service industry "what keeps you awake at night?" the most frequently-mentioned topic was how to use customer feedback to drive performance improvement. This may seem surprising given the number of organizations that regularly gather surveys, comment cards, and other sources of customer data. But, based on the feedback I get, it appears that a large number of these companies are not satisfied with their ability to use customer feedback to improve performance and/or achieve desired business results. Integrating customer feedback into a continuous improvement process is the essential.
Continuous Improvement – Doing It Right
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, W. Edwards Deming popularized the notion of viewing quality improvement as a continuous, closed-loop process. This same approach has been discussed in connection with customer satisfaction measurement and management for at least 15 years The idea is fairly simple: Use measures of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction (and related voice of the customer data) to identify priority issues for improvement. Plan and implement efforts to address those issues, and then gather new measurements to determine if actions taken are having their intended effect. Apply this process on a continuous basis to monitor and manage customer experiences in ways that will lead to desired business results.
