Q. How do you tie customer
satisfaction into the overall
growth plan of a company?
It ties in by the strategy that
with greater customer satisfaction comes a greater likelihood of additional purchase behavior.
We’ve set seven key strategic
objectives as a company, and I
don’t have a problem sharing
them because I think it’s all logical. We have three financial
objectives: revenue, earning and
cash flow growth. We have four
nonfinancial objectives that we
measure religiously because
they’re the key. They are customer retention, customer satisfaction, associate retention and
associate satisfaction.
At the end of the day, having
happy employees and happy
customers who are using your
products is pretty much a winning formula. I think any company out there can make it that
simple and succeed.
Q. What should company
leaders keep in mind when it
comes to measuring customer
and employee satisfaction?
Continuous improvement.
Measuring where you stand on
a metric like customer satisfaction or associate satisfaction is a touch point, but it’s
what you do with the data to
continually improve.
So if we have an associate
satisfaction survey that highlights a particular area or concern, what are we doing to
improve upon that, and then
how do we measure progress.
That’s an important element.
We measure the progress a
couple ways: follow-up surveys
with the associates, informal
focus groups. For example, ‘We
heard you say in the last associate survey that we’re not doing
enough on internal training.
Here are some of the things
we’ve done. Here are some of
the things we’re thinking about
doing. What do you think?’
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