Customer satisfaction, in short, is the difference between expectation and experience. Suppose you expect nothing and get a little, then you are still somewhat satisfied. If you expect a lot, but get less, then you are not so satisfied. That way, you can be happy with a croquette sandwich, but balking at a seafood banquet with lobster.
Like croquette and lobster, it takes a lot to create a positive experience. Fresh ingredients, the perfect preparation method, attractive presentation, reasonable pricing, a pleasant setting and more. It is not just the chef or the waiter who is responsible for a satisfied customer. It is the entire chain that participates.
Although customer satisfaction is often measured periodically, it is not something you do periodically. And in fact, you shouldn't measure it periodically either, but continuously. Measuring periodically sends the wrong message to the organization. As if there are a few defining moments in the year when customer satisfaction is an issue. But delivering satisfaction is a job for everyone in the company and it is an issue that is important every day. In that sense, working on customer satisfaction is the same as working on quality management. That too is about continuous improvement, with everyone in the organization playing a role.
Because customer satisfaction is everyone's responsibility at all times, you can also think of it as a cultural issue. Every employee in the organization must have the understanding that he or she contributes something to a customer's experience. Everyone in the organization matters .No one is unimportant and what is something small in the eyes of an employee can make a huge difference to a customer. Just a smile or a kind word can cause a happy customer. A kind word can even compensate for a mediocre croquette sandwich. Compensating for a mediocre lobster seafood sandwich may require a little more than a kind word.
Dissatisfied customers usually don't complain. They vote with their feet. Either they walk away and are not likely to return. The annoying thing is that they also tend to proactively share their negative experience with others. If they have become beyond your reach, there is very little you can do about it either. You no longer have a say in what they say about you, because you are no longer engaging with them. This is another reason why it is important to hear directly from customers, not periodically, what they think of your product or service. In the moment, it may be painful to hear, but a complaint does give you the fantastic opportunity to correct mistakes and save customer relationships.
The hospitality industry is the place par excellence where product experience, customer experience and feedback all come together in one moment." Everything satisfactory?" is a familiar phrase, but not the right one. "How's the lobster today?" would be a better question. Of course, you don't ask that question via email in a quarterly survey, but right at the table the moment the guest has taken their first bites. That's the moment you can still fix something if necessary. It may cost you a new and better-prepared lobster and a house drink, but in doing so, you gain a customer who leaves the premises happy and of good will to write down his positive experience in a review. A drink on the house, you say? No need for that. A lobster is expensive enough as it is. Wrong - it was about giving more than your customer expects, remember. The bare cost of a free drink is a few euros. What it generates in specific situations is worth much more than a few euros. A positive review can easily generate hundreds of extra euros in sales.
It really is as simple as it seems, yet it often goes wrong. What can we learn from this? Briefly, three things: 1) timing your measurement while there is still room for correction in a positive sense, 2) just listening to your customer is not enough, you have to do something with it and immediately and 3) in all cases you have to ask and help satisfied customers to give you an online positive review. The power of positive reviews is enormous.
The word "peak end experience" has been around for a while. In marketing terms, it is also called "peak end experience." A peak end experience is a sophisticated way of ensuring that your customers are left with a positive feeling from an interaction. At IKEA, it's the hot dog for 50 cents once you've passed the checkout. Shopify provides its platform partners with 44 ideas and tools to say "thank you for your order."
Customer satisfaction in a B2B environment
The temptation is to say, "Yeah easy, those are nice things you can do in hospitality or consumer marketing. We're a construction company, machine shop or transportation company. That's different.". Your product or service is different, true. But your customer is not someone else. Your customer also comes to IKEA, buys from Coolblue and orders something from a Shopify store. The experience he gets there is the new standard that you as a business-to-business company must measure up to. Your customer gets an ultimate customer-centric approach from Coolblue and expects an honest and friendly approach from you in the same way.
How do you make relevant KPIs for customer satisfaction transparent?
If you want to know if you're doing well or not, you have to start measuring. The right question at the right time, with the ability to examine negative experiences and turn them into positive ones as quickly as possible. Moreover, you want to know across the board how your performance on customer satisfaction is, because that's a KPI of your organization(if it's right). Ultimately, customer satisfaction is something that affects the entire organization and allows for continuous improvement. This also automatically makes it the domain of the quality manager. Who has the ability to structurally use the recording of customer experience to continuously improve.
QHSE, KAM and quality managers using ISO2HANDLE's platform can seamlessly incorporate customer satisfaction into their management systems. The software provides the ability to record, visualize and analyze customer experiences overall. But that same software can also pick up individual customer cases and present them to the appropriate employee in a company for evaluation or correction. You can analyze whether you are looking at single incidents or whether there is a trend. This allows you to determine whether isolated follow-up actions need to be taken or whether structural improvement is needed. Your ISO2HANDLE platform helps you manage customer satisfaction the way it's meant to be managed.
Would you like to know more about it? We are eager to hear your question, so don't hesitate.
