Copyright American Marketing Association Jan 4, 1993A. Parasuraman's and Len Berry's book Marketing Services: Competing Through Quality, says there are basically three ways t identify the customer's potential level of dissatisfaction: monitor customer complaints, ask the customer how satisfied he or she is, and "blueprint" your organization service system to identify potential trouble spots caused by bureaucracy.
Monitoring customer complaints is commendable, but by itself it can be very misleading. TARP data show that 94% of unhappy customers never bother to tell us about their dissatisfaction. They may feel that complaining isn't worth the effort, would not have any effect, or they just don't know to whom to complain.
Additionally, individuals who do complain are not typically representative of the total population of people with problems. Complainers tend to be white males with higher incomes.
Blueprinting one's service system is also a very important step in increasing overall customer satisfaction. As Lynn Shostack describes blueprinting, it is a holistic method of seeing what is essentially a dynamic living phenomenon.
This technique requires a great deal of effort on the part of the organization, but for those committed to customer satisfaction, it is worth the effort. One cannot manage what one can't measure, and many of us have policies and procedures that reduce our ability to serve the customer. The process of mapping out the various relationships within and between departments serves to aid in the identification and elimination of these policies.
The technique that is closest to the core concept of marketing in identifying customer satisfaction levels is simply to ask the customers how satisfied they are. Most organizations have not historically bothered to take this step.
On a positive note, more and more businesses and organizations are realizing the benefits of developing a formal system of monitoring customer opinions and perceptions of the quality of a company's goods and services. Some are driven to this step out of a sincere desire to improve the quality of their organizational efforts, some out of competitive necessity, others due to the misperception that by executing customer satisfaction research, all the firm's problems will disappear.
Regardless of the reason, asking the customer's opinions can only help a business move to a customer centered strategy and away from an organizationally centered approach.
A good customer satisfaction program serves as an external form of quality control that is service-centered, communication-centered, and continuous in nature. It allows an organization to monitor the thought and opinions of its customers in a comprehensive manner that is both accurate and precise. Most important, a strong customer satisfaction program allows an organization to develop actionable strategies to reduce customer problems.
At the same time, the continuous nature of the research allows the firm to monitor the outcomes of these same action-oriented strategies.
The results of this research can be applied in many different ways. Customer satisfaction research can be used to develop long-term strategic plans as well as more immediate customer relations problems. It can be used as a valuable addition to training programs and even serve as basis for employee compensation and bonuses.
In short, the outcome of customer satisfaction research is really versatile. One can never know exactly how it will be used totally until it is collected and analyzed.
The level of interest in customer satisfaction research has paralleled the growth of two intertwined fields, total quality management (TQM) and quality service. Although TQM has existed for decades, it has only been in the past few years that America has begun to embrace it more fully. Whether it's through Deming's 14 steps or Kaizen, America's corporations are discovering that the concept of continuous improvement is rooted in getting closer to the customer.
With the book Service America!: Doing Business in the New Economy, by Albrecht and Zemke in 1985, the service sector has also begun to understand the importance of bringing the power of the customer into the center of its business. Both of these movements strongly advocate customer satisfaction research as an integral part of a quality organization.
As one would expect, market research suppliers have reacted to the shifting corporate emphasis toward customer satisfaction research. It would be difficult to find a market research supplier that doesn't claim to possess customer satisfaction research capabilities. However, only a few actually have separate divisions within their organizations that do nothing but customer satisfaction research or are a customer satisfaction specialist.
Why would a research firm concentrate on only customer satisfaction or create a separate division to address only this market? According to Gary Hren, managing director of Burke Customer Satisfaction Associates of Cincinnati, while this type of research looks easy, it's really very specialized.
Hren observes that companies seeking assistance in satisfaction research are not just looking for general research skills. They require the expertise that can collect and analyze data as well as "recommend how to use the information to drive change with the organization."
This expertise only comes with time and experience in the field of customer satisfaction. What typically develops is as much a consultative relationship as simply that of a research supplier.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things I discovered while researching this article was the small number of marketing research firms that sell customer satisfaction to clients and actually use this same tool internally.
One can imagine a salesperson from a marketing research supplier calling on a prospective customer and "pitching" satisfaction research. The salesperson would describe the various benefits and the versatility of this research, and stress many of the points made about the technique that are described in this article.
One could further imagine the interested client asking this salesperson whether his or her company uses satisfaction research themselves to reap all the same benefits. The answer might not be what you imagine.
During the course of writing this article, only five research companies could be identified as possessing their own customer satisfaction program: Burke Marketing Research, Consumer Research Inc., the Gordon Black Co., Maritz Marketing Research, and Walker Marketing Research. Although I am sure I have probably missed a few (and to those companies, I apologize), I am even more sure that this number is minuscule compared to the total number of existing research companies.
Why wouldn't a research company, with all its research capabilities, employ such a tool? Why wouldn't any company? It requires extra effort and a strong commitment to the customer to embark on such a program.
Nancy Bunn, director of Burke's customer satisfaction program, states that by employing satisfaction research internally, Burke really gets to listen to its customers and focus on their concerns. Bunn explains that at Burke, an independent auditor is used to contact its clients and to measure overall satisfaction ratings as well as specific ratings on individual projects, the account executive, and the project team.
These findings are then communicated back to the overall project team and its managers. As an additional step, all of the internal satisfaction audits are inspected in an aggregate format by a steering committee for opportunities to make companywide improvements.
In Service America, Albrecht and Zemke state "the ability to understand customers' needs and wants can be summed up in a simple phrase, 'Always be learning.'"
Customer satisfaction research allows an organization to do just that. The knowledge obtained by talking to one's customers can help the organization prepare itself for an increasingly competitive market and not only survive, but thrive.
Tom Hayes, a member of the AMA Marketing Research Council, is the director of institutional advancement and chair and professor in the marketing department at Xavier University, Cincinnati.
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