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Customer Satisfaction
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The more companies succeed in orienting their products and services towards the needs and expectations of their customers, the likelier it is that they will forge a long-lasting relationship with them, because the bait has to appeal to the fish, not the angler.
Within the framework of measuring customer satisfaction, Vocatus therefore ascertains how satisfied your customers are with the range of services your company offers and/or how likely it is that they will recommend you to others, thus revealing strengths and weaknesses from a customer perspective.
The results serve on the one hand as a management index and early warning system, while on the other hand it is possible to directly identify concrete potential for improvement in individual areas of the company such as marketing, sales, product development, and customer service.
Meaningful Questions
Your customers have certain expectations: if the latter are satisfied or even exceeded, your customers are satisfied, or even greatly so.
This satisfaction arises as the sum of the contacts a customer has with your company. Such points of contact are many and varied during the course of the customer life cycle: they can comprise discussions about contracts and credit, ordering and delivery processes, rates and pricing, the customer hotline, the behaviour of field-based staff, or dealing with complaints.
Only if one appropriately illustrates how these points of contact impact upon individual customer histories can one also derive valuable measures from the results of the survey. This is why we only ask your customers about facets of your products and services that they've actually already come into contact with, and which they can still recall.
The results only become meaningful if we don't force your customers to rate their satisfaction concerning every possible aspect of performance. It isn't a case of asking customers about everything you'd like to know, but instead we should ask them about things upon which they can make valid comments. Thus less is often more.
Ascertaining Critical Incidents
At Vocatus, the measurement of customer satisfaction is embedded in a hierarchical data gathering design that can be extended in a modular fashion. In addition to overall satisfaction, we initially ascertain satisfaction with all the relevant customer interfaces.
For selected 'critical' customer interfaces there then follows a detailed analysis of customer satisfaction, using a clearly operationalised list of criteria. At the 'lowest' level, we use open questions to ascertain the critical (i.e. positive as well as negative) experiences each customer has. Sophisticated filtering in our questionnaires permits us to find out about each customer's individual experiences.
Relevant Benchmark Data
In order to be in a position to assess the level of customer satisfaction that has been ascertained, one mustn't only look at one's own performance. It should also be rated in relation to the relevant competition. If the benchmark data is gathered within the context of the same study, this guarantees that the comparison data is relevant and up-to-date.
Changing Demands
Customer satisfaction surveys are typically repeated at given intervals, because only then is it possible to check the effectiveness of the measures that have been deduced. It is also vitally important here to analyse the change in customers' demands over time, so as to duly adjust one's own products and services.
In most sectors it can be established that customers' demands relating to products or services are constantly rising and/or that different customer segments also have differing expectations of you. Thus, for example, it is the case in some sectors that good service is less and less able to compensate for high prices over the course of time, or the particularly valuable customer expects correspondingly better service.
How People See Themselves, and How Others See Them
One effective addition to the customer survey is to survey one's own staff. In such cases, staff who are in direct contact with the customer (dealers, sales, customer care) are likewise asked about customer satisfaction within the framework of the customer survey.
Contrasting customer satisfaction from the staff perspective (how people see themselves) with actual customer satisfaction (how others see them) often shows up significant differences, and makes a major contribution to the acceptance of necessary changes within the company.
Results that Relate to Practice
We use our analyses to produce clear, cause-related, and action-oriented suggestions. They allow you to immediately and directly improve the customer relationship where it's formed and experienced.
Furthermore, we prioritise our proposed improvements in line with their relevance and the time, money, and effort expended in implementing them so that you accurately judge which changes have the greatest impact upon customer satisfaction, and which measure you should tackle first.