In short, customer satisfaction is the difference between expectations and experience. Suppose you don't expect anything and get a little, you're still a bit satisfied. If you expect a lot, but you get less, you are not so satisfied. That way, you can be happy with a croquette sandwich, but hate a lobster seafood.
Just like croquette and lobster, it takes a lot to create a positive experience. Fresh ingredients, the perfect preparation method, an attractive presentation, reasonable pricing, a pleasant setting and more. Not only the cook or waiter is responsible for a satisfied customer. It is the entire chain that participates.
While customer satisfaction is often measured periodically, it's not something you do periodically. And actually, you shouldn't measure it periodically, but continuously. Periodic measurement sends the wrong signal to the organization. As if there are a few defining times of the year when customer satisfaction is an issue. But delivering satisfaction is everyone's job in the company and it's a topic that matters every day. In this sense, working on customer satisfaction is the same as working on quality management. This is also about continuous improvement, where everyone in the organization plays a role.
Because customer satisfaction is everyone's responsibility at all times, you can also see it as a cultural topic. Every employee in the organization must understand that he or she is contributing something to a customer's experience. Everyone in the organization matters. No one is unimportant and what an employee thinks is a small thing can make a huge difference for a customer. A smile or a friendly word can already cause a happy customer. A friendly word can even compensate for a mediocre croquette sandwich. Compensating for a mediocre lobster seafood may require a little more than a friendly word.
Dissatisfied customers don't usually complain. They vote with their feet. Or they run away and won't come back so soon. The annoying thing is that they are also prone to proactively share their negative experience with others. If they've gotten out of your reach, there's very little you can do about it either. You can't control what they say about you anymore because you're not talking to them anymore. For this reason, it is also important not to hear from customers periodically, but directly, what they think of your product or service. It may be painful to hear at the moment, but a complaint does give you the fantastic opportunity to fix errors and save customer relationships.
The hospitality sector is the ideal place where product experience, customer experience and feedback come together at one moment. “Everything according to your wishes?” is a familiar phrase, but not the correct one. “How is the lobster today?” would be a better question. Of course, you don't ask that question via email in a quarterly survey, but directly at the table when the guest has taken their first bites. That is the time when you can restore something if necessary. It may cost you a new and better-prepared lobster and a drink from the house, but that will result in a customer who leaves the building happy and is of good will to write down their positive end experience in a review. A drink from the house, you say? There is no need for that. A lobster is already expensive enough. Wrong! It was about giving more than your customer expects, remember. The bare cost of a free drink is a few euros. What it delivers in specific situations is worth much more than a few euros. A positive review can just generate hundreds of extra euros in turnover.
It really is as easy as it seems, but it often goes wrong. What can we learn from this? In short, three things: 1) you do the timing of your measurement when a positive correction can still be made, 2) just listening to your customer is not enough, you also have to do something with it immediately and 3) in all cases, you should ask satisfied customers and help give you a positive review online. The power of positive reviews is enormous.
The word “end experience” has been around for a while now. In marketing terms, this is also called “peak end experience”. A peak end experience is a sophisticated way to make your customers feel positive about interacting. At IKEA, it's the hot dog for 50 cents when you've passed the checkout. Shopify provides its platform partners with 44 ideas and tools to say “thank you for your order.”
Customer satisfaction in a B2B environment
There is a great temptation to say, “yes, easy, these are fun things you can do in the hospitality industry or consumer marketing. We are a construction company, machine factory or transport company. That's different.”. Your product or service is different, that's true. But your customer isn't someone else. Your customer also comes to IKEA, buys from Coolblue, and orders from a Shopify store. The experience he gains there is the new standard that you, as a business-to-business company, should measure up to. Your customer gets an ultimate customer-focused approach from Coolblue and expects you to take an honest and friendly approach in the same way.
How do you provide insight into relevant customer satisfaction KPIs?
If you want to know if you're doing well or not, you should start measuring. The right question at the right time, with the ability to explore negative experiences and turn them into positive ones as quickly as possible. In addition, you want to know your overall performance on customer satisfaction, because that's your organization's KPI (if all is well). Ultimately, customer satisfaction is something that concerns the entire organization and that makes continuous improvement possible. This means that it is also automatically the domain of the quality manager. It has the ability to structurally use the recording of customer experience to continuously improve.
QHSE, KAM and quality managers who use the ISO2HANDLE platform can seamlessly incorporate customer satisfaction into their management system. The software provides the ability to record, visualize and analyze customer experiences overall. But the same software can also pick up individual customer cases and offer them to the right employee in a company for evaluation or correction. You can analyse whether you are looking at individual incidents or whether there is a trend. This way, you can decide for yourself whether separate follow-up actions should be taken or whether a structural improvement is necessary. You ISO2 HANDLE platform helps you manage customer satisfaction the way it was intended.
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