Customer Satisfaction Process:

At the heart of any successful strategy to ‘manage’ customer satisfaction is the ability to “listen to the customer”. They suggest five categories of approach.

1. Customer satisfaction indices

2. Feedback

3. Market research

4. Front-line personnel

5. Strategic activities

1. Customer Satisfaction Indices:

Customer satisfaction indices are among the most popular methods of tracking or measuring customer satisfaction. Indeed, business of all sorts now divert consider energies into tracking customer satisfaction in this way.

2. Feedback:

Feedback in this context includes comments, complaints and questions ,It may be among the most effective means of establishing what the customer regards as a satisfactory level of performance and whether ‘dissatisfiers’ exist within the operation as it is based on actual performance rather than contrived situations.

3. Market Research:

In addition to research among customers and non-customers into potential ‘satisfiers’, ‘dissatisfiers’ and ‘customer expectations’, market research can be used as customer entrance (to establish drivers which bought the customer to the company) and customer exit (to establish those factors which cause the customer to go elsewhere).Again more valuable information may be achieved in the latter rather than the former as it is based on actual behavior rather than the perception.

4. Frontline Personnel:

Direct contact with staff can provide a good means of listening to the customer. As it is frequently suggested that many customers, rather than making a formal complaint to the company, will simply break the relationship. Frontline staff provides an opportunity for less formal sounding on complaints which might to otherwise not be heard. The crucial factor here is how this information is fed back into the decision-making process.

5. Strategic activities:

Actively involving in the customer in the company decision making may be means of pre-empting potential “dissatisfiers” and establishing potential “satisfiers”.