Grab your customers before its too late!

The markets are shrinking. Businesses have only one way to survive - they must build customer loyalty to earn repeat business. The easiest way to build loyalty with customers is to increase their pleasure when conducting business with you. This is known as 'Customer Satisfaction' and must be obtained in order to run a successful business.

"The gulf between

satisfied customers and

completely satisfied

customers can swallow

a business."

- Harvard Business Review

This was a quote from the Harvard Business Review in 1995. This information was found off the website of a customer service measuring website. The company name is Quality Digest. They act as a 3rd party for businesses by calling customers and asking about the service they received at their last visit. The information is gathered and a report is sent to the company. A company can use the data collected by Quality Digest to increase their service in areas that are lacking, and continue to excel in areas that are pleasing customers.

There are several trends that occur with many companies that use this service. Let me set the stage with an example: "Company A" newly hired Quality Digest do perform customer service phone calls so they can learn how customers viewed the service they received. After the first month, Quality Digest sends the report to the owner of the business. The scores are "completely satisfied" is a few categories, "somewhat satisfied" in a few categories, and "dissatisfied" in one category.

Now besides that one "dissatisfied" category, that is not a bad rating - everybody was satisfied in one way or another by the service. Company A puts forward an initiative to increase the score from the "dissatisfied" category to a score more acceptable. The next month, another report is delivered to the owner of Company A. This month, the company was able to increase that score to "Completely Satisfied". However, it seemed that the efforts put forth to increase that score caused the employees to sacrifice time and focus in the other categories, which caused those scores to fall drastically.

The lesson here is to correct what needs to be fixed, but pay close attention to your other areas of focus as well. Just because you GOT a high customer service score before does not mean that it will happen again with less work. Remember how hard you worked to get that score, and that is how hard you must work in order to keep that score.

This is a very interesting website and company. Their site offers statistics about customer service and the benefits it can have for your customers:

"A 5% increase in loyalty can increase profits by 25%-85%"

When you get a job, think about these facts and how strong customer service can help grow a company. Good service goes farther than you could imagine!

http://www.qualitydigest.com/sept00/html/satisfaction.html