In a recent study on customer satisfaction, conducted by an international consulting firm, it was discovered that 75% of corporate chief executives questioned believed that their firms provided "above average" service. When their customers were surveyed, however, the majority had the opposite opinion; almost 60% stated they were upset with their most recent service experience!
I'd call that a huge disconnect between belief and reality. Maybe those CEO's are using Alice in Wonderland's mirror to look at the way their company services their customers.
Rather than ask or discuss why there such a difference between belief in the level of service and the customer satisfaction reality, I'm going to ask a different question. What level of customer service do YOU believe your firm delivers? Is your answer based on looking into Alice's mirror, or do you have data? What criteria do you use to measure your level of customer satisfaction? Is it the same criteria that your customers use?
One business owner in an industry that delivers a high-personal-touch service to businesses wanted to know what her customers felt about the service they received and, if it wasn't as good as they felt it should be, how it could be improved. So she asks them. Once a month she invites a half-dozen "average" customers to a customer satisfaction breakfast meeting and asks for the good, the bad, and the ugly. When she finds areas that the business needs to improve, she works to improve them, developing feed-back information loops, ways of measuring raw data to discover methods of improving, methods of training staff to a higher awareness of the customer service contact points, and ways to deliver their products with more courtesy, timeliness, and consistency.
There are many ways to uncover this information, depending upon the type of product or service you sell, from follow-up phone calls, emails, and mailed surveys, to personal meetings. They all work. The important thing is to get feedback, discover whether you are satisfying your customers and, if there is a disconnect between belief and reality, to develop an improvement fast. Don't let your belief fog the mirror of customer satisfaction - clean it with real data from your customers.
