It is often said "Customer is the King" and that "Customer is always right". These otherwise simplistic statement embody enormous wisdom. The world has moved from dearth to abundance of supply; coupled with increased consumerism, consciousness of human rights.
The most interesting 'global' development over the last millennium has been the researching of the customers and consumers viewpoint and verifying attitudes to products and services.
With innovation occurring more quickly and products becoming uniform in different markets around the world, customer satisfaction has been the key growth area of market research in recent years. There are compelling reasons for enterprises delivering and monitoring customer satisfaction by not just their sales persons, but the whole organisation in a uni focal manner.
Branding and value addition are a means of better revenues and profits. Monitoring effective brands requires close attention to the customer and consumer needs. Competitive pressures necessitates innovation and newness to achieve consumer preference for goods or services.
This in turn means researching the needs and even psychographics of the users to provide them the satisfaction from the use of such goods and services. Even to ensure retention of customers in this era of rapid change and global influences on preferences requires regular, objective monitoring and assessment of consumer nuances and fulfilment of these before a competitor does it and gnaws away market share.
Growth in scale of enterprise, whether for profit or not, requires increased market size and market share. To increase market size based on researched consumer needs, goods and services can be designed to gain first time users. To increase market share such research findings are used to offer that which the competitors do not, achieving preference for the enterprises offer.
Management now has the opportunity of taking advantage of a series of new techniques that have emerged for monitoring of customer satisfaction. An example is the growth of 'mystery shopping' - this is the observation of how the customer is really cared for (the virtual reality of customer monitoring) at the place of work and the process of dealing with customers.
Customer satisfaction is delivered by the organisation, not a few individuals or any one department. Thus against investigated consumer needs, the procurement department ensures the right raw and packing materials.
The provocation ensures product to given specs., marketing ensures the correct 4 P's and research provides the feedback to complete the loop of C.I (concept of Continuous Improvement). Thus using the data results of research, an index can be made which, when collected regularly, provides an indication of customer satisfaction performance.
This the management can use as an indicator of their decision-making; calculating staff rewards and profit sharing based on such performance indices collected from reporting customer care and presenting even in companies' annual reports is a way to ensure a combined effort of all management and workers and even shareholders to become uni directional behind delivering of the vital customer satisfaction.
There has also been a consolidation of an increasing trend in creating data where it did not already exist, but its contribution is to provide an additional indication of how effectively service is provided. A prerequisite however, is that the leadership of the enterprise gains agreement with all levels of management and workers that customer monitoring feedback will be used at all levels, specially management meetings, to measure performance.
Then, decide on the techniques to be used to deliver and monitor. In research technique ensure that sufficient numbers of interviews are carried out to represent all types of classifications of the customer. Use a definitive list of customers which provides for both users (consumers) and buyers (customers) of your products and services to get a good comparison of the type of customer and consumers and the contact he/she has with the company, direct or indirect.
Design the attitude statements carefully to measure all aspects of customer contact. Do not make the evaluation too exhaustive, but ensure it includes all aspects that can be assessed for good and bad performance. With customer satisfaction achieved, the enterprise can be confident of continued delivering of its mandates. In fact this is only way to survive.