Listen to your customers
In your surveys, don�t rely entirely on scales and precoded questions. Record what your customers say, in their own words. In addition, set up effective feedback systems so that all customers can tell you what they want you to know.
Listen to your staff
Always remember that your employees are your customers.
Run regular employee satisfaction surveys use them to drive change for the benefit of the employees
Involve your staff
Everyone prefers to give good service and to be thanked for it - when they can. If you expect staff to act on the findings of CSM, involve them before starting research, and then at every stage.
Run staff workshops, to find out what staff think is important to customers, and to identify what prevents them delivering good service.
Run more workshops, to present the customers� point of view, and to develop action programmes.
Whether your service will satisfy customers will, in the longer run, depend on what they could get elsewhere. Benchmark the most important service criteria with the leaders in your industry. A syndicated survey can be the most cost effective and the most objective instrument.
Compare your units against one another
Internal benchmarking can be a powerful motivator. Let your best branches, call centres, etc. show the rest what can be achieved. Reward those that make improvements.
Survey your staff and correlate the results, unit by unit, with CSM findings.
Tell it like it is
Make sure to cover all significant aspects of service in your market � even ones that your own organisation doesn�t offer. It's not enough to provide excellent service through one particular channel, if customers are abandoning it in favour of some newer delivery mechanism.
Relate survey data to customer behaviour
Some things, that customers say are important, do not much affect their behaviour. Use your customer database to estimate customer value and to test the predictive utility of different survey responses, e.g. in determining future defections or repeat purchases.
Find out why your customers defect
Many of them may be entirely satisfied! They leave for all sorts of reasons. Good service is important. But it is not all-important. If there are non-service reasons for losing customers, then make your tracking surveys cover those too.
Survey key events
If your business is one in which there are obvious key events � sales, railway journeys, holidays, insurance claims, breakdown calls � then use samples of these events as a basis for surveys.
Strike while the iron is hot
Memories of trivial experiences decay very rapidly. Even minutes matter, if you want to know just what the customer experienced, and how he felt about it. Weeks or months afterwards, some customers fail to recall anything at all, especially for unsolicited events such as the receipt of a mailing.
Survey your customers
Some businesses - such as breakdown services and insurance - make their profits from customers who don't use their services. Surveys of key events will miss them out.
Set up regular surveys of all customers. Take the opportunity to explore other aspects of service, besides the key events, and to cover branding issues.
Don't ignore those who aren't (yet) customers
By all means, survey your new customers. It may be even more useful to survey those who asked for quotes, took test drives etc., but didn't buy. Find out what attracted them to you, and to your competitors, and why in the end they went elsewhere.
Don't forget lapsed customers. Some companies find them the best source of new or renewed businessTrack critical service measures
Concentrate on the main issues. Make sure that the results of your tracking surveys are fully exploited.
Don't put all your effort into tracking. Use some of the budget for qualitative investigations, one off surveys, mystery shopping and other techniques, and developing service improvements.
Don't expect rapid rises in service ratings. Ratings reflect customers' expectations. When service improves, expectations rise. And many businesses have to run hard just to keep up with competition in a changing marketplace.
Sample the time dimension
Times change, and so does service delivery. There is no particular time that is "right" for a survey. So collect tracking data continuously, or at least very frequently. Analyse the data using moving averages and other smoothing techniques, to show trends. But do not bombard managers with too-frequent reports and presentations.
Don't be a slave to the past
Keep your surveys up to date. Even at the cost of losing continuity. It is pointless to collect data that no longer reflect reality.
Don�t rely on surveys to reveal service failures
Surveys are expensive, and there is bound to be a time lag before any decline in service shows up in the data. Instead, use automatic systems and work-in-progress measures to tell you if queues or turnaround times are getting longer.
Don't leave it all to the research agency
The agency can help, but ultimately you, the client, will have to take the necessary steps to improve service.
Make sure that everyone who can influence service has access to your customer survey information, as and when they can use it. Not only front-line staff, but the managers who determine policy and make the difficult choices between cost savings and service improvements.
Prioritise service improvements
You need to assess
� The extent to which a proposed improvement is likely to affect customer satisfaction.
� The cost of the improvement.
� The pay-off; the value of improving satisfaction.
Only some of the information will come from surveys. You will need to integrate your Customer Satisfaction programme with other parts of the organisation's
Improve service through experiments
Customers will soon tell you when they aren�t getting expected levels of service. But they are not generally very good at suggesting radical improvements. It takes imagination as well as application to improve service delivery. And whatever customers say about a proposed improvement, you need to test it to make sure that it works out as planned.
Respect legislation and codes of conduct
All surveys and customer records must conform to the Data Protection Act. Anything presented as market research must abide by the Market
Research Society's Code of Conduct. This does not mean that responses have to be anonymous, only that no individuals should be identifiable from the analysis.