Oct 07 2007
Customer Satisfaction and Quality Improvement
Many firms are driving a renewed focus on customer satisfaction through a variety of initiatives. Of course, many of these campaigns are well-intentioned, and will produce important gains for their businesses. However, there’s some real concern on the part of the workers whose job it is to execute these initiatives.
Their concern centers on the apparent “soft” nature of customer satisfaction. How do we define it? How do we measure it? How will we talk about it using data? Simply saying “improve customer satisfaction” isn’t enough. As Dr. W. E. Deming observed, “It’s not enough to do your best, you must know what to do” before progress can be made.
The projects I was fortunate enough to see this past week were all good ones, focusing on real needs. Some involved new process definition and implementation, while more examined issues with existing, operating processes. Many could use Lean Thinking tools as well, to avoid local optimizations that would simply not be noticed, or worse yet, damage other productivity. A week of working and learning, and these projects are in good hands, I feel.
The topic of most interest, over and over, was how to quantify the benefits of enhancing customer satisfaction. Of course, it’s an almost universal belief that improving customer satisfaction leads to more and better business. And in some situations, the connection is clear and direct. However, for many professionals who are not directly connected to the business’s external customer base, these connections are often tougher to elucidate and vocalize.
I used a tool that has general applications to help with this effort. I’ve used it effectively in analyzing the benefits of eliminating muda from systems, and it translates well to customer satisfaction clarification.
I begin with a large, blank sheet of paper taped to the wall in landscape orientation, and mark three columns. On the first column I place a header: “Elements.” The question: “What elements of our business, within our project scope, have an impact on customer satisfaction?” A list appears fairly quickly in most cases.
On the second column I write “Changes Inside.” The question here: “When we implement our improvement, what customer satisfaction related changes should/will/must we see inside the process?” For each item in Elements there should be one or more Changes shown.
The third column is headed by “Deliverables.” This column lists all the concrete benefits that derive from the changes. These include increased response, reduced dispatches and rework, lower costs, and more. Productivity, timeliness, financial metrics and quality are all possible items here.
For the first column, the entries should be nouns, perhaps with modifiers. For the second column, the standard categories of causes (methods, machines, measurements, materials, people, environment) work as a checklist to drive the brainstorm to completion. This second column also helps to illuminate the costs and challenges. The final column is where the project leads see the measurable items that finance can use to estimate savings and/or new revenues.
After this discussion, several team leaders expressed confidence that they could now build a meaningful cost-benefit evaluation so their projects could be justified meaningfully.
They also said they now had a better idea of the connections between what they do and what the customer needs. It all comes full circle…
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