Increase Profitability Through Customer Satisfaction
Part 3 of 3

In part two we discussed how proper survey design and identifying revenue drivers are critical steps to increasing profitability through customer satisfaction.

In the final part of this tutorial, we help you develop revenue-generating tactics from your customer insight.

Actionable Reporting

Most companies are content to report the basics, such as location-by-location ratings. While this information lets everyone know where they stand, it does not guide them towards increasing revenue.

From the marketing and sales analysis described above, you can now inform your organization which specific attributes contribute the most to customer satisfaction, at each location. This will focus everyone’s attention on the changes that actually matter most to your customers.

The next step is to link specific employee behaviors and marketing tactics to your reporting. While it’s vital to inform each location about what needs to improve, telling them how to improve is critical. Here are some suggestions:

•  Link your reporting outcomes to your existing employee training.

•  Where employee training doesn’t exist, you should recommend best practices that
    have been proven to work. This is most effective when delivered by your own
    frontline employees. Industry trends or third party professional recommendations
    also provide a fresh perspective.

•  Integrate customer satisfaction improvement into your existing processes, where
    possible. For example, if location managers meet with their staff on a weekly basis,
    ensure they discuss where their customer satisfaction improvement efforts should
    be focused.

•  Reporting should be simple, visual and specific to the person viewing it. Most
    companies make the mistake of trying to communicate too much information,
    resulting in a loss of focus.

•  Reports should clearly outline bite-sized goals to keep all stakeholders focused
    and motivated.

Digging Deeper

There are two types of customer satisfaction initiatives – passive and proactive.

A passive initiative does not evolve over time. The same information is captured and reported and, usually, there is little or no improvement in customer satisfaction.

Conversely, a proactive initiative continues to evolve by digging deeper and identifying solutions that result in continuous improvements to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The insights derived from a well designed survey will guide you where to go. In some cases, it may be sufficient to make simple adjustments to your survey. For example, you may have identified that a source of customer frustration comes from not finding the item they were looking for. By simply adding one or two new questions to your survey, you will be able to learn the items to which they’re referring.

In other cases, separate panels (or studies) will be needed to capture a much greater depth of customer insight. For example, you may identify that customers find a particular product category to be inferior to your competitors. To fix this problem, you need to understand more about that product, such as which attributes are poorly perceived, how customers prioritize each attribute and which competitors are being compared. Please note that overloading your ongoing survey with too many questions will compromise the data, which is why we recommend using separate panels.

One important note about evolving your customer initiatives – always maintain one or more baseline measurements (such as satisfaction, frequency of visit, etc.) so that you can track progress over time. This is especially important for measuring the success of your tactical implementation.

Tactical Implementation

By this stage of the process, you will have developed tangible, actionable solutions to improve customer satisfaction. Converting customer strategy into effective tactics is a crucial step that will require cooperation between marketing and operations.

If your service provider does not get involved in the solutions process, you will need to tap the brains of your own team. Take one customer issue or challenge and brainstorm about different processes and on-location marketing tactics will provide a solution.

Once you have done this for 3-5 topics, you can prioritize them based on the following criteria:

•  Impact on customer satisfaction and revenue
•  Cost of implementation
•  Ease of implementation
•  Company mandates

Some tactics will require a simple change to an existing process. Other tactics may require new equipment, systems and training.

Keep in mind that external partners may need to be brought in to assist with the implementation phase. Be sure to evaluate each potential partner to ensure they are well equipped to handle the job.

Before any tactic is implemented across your network, we recommend selecting a group of locations to participate in a pilot. This will allow you to (a) determine if the tactic is successful and (b) fine tune your tactic before rolling it out.

Measuring Success

This is the stage at which everyone nervously awaits the good news. You should hopefully see a measurable increase in customer satisfaction at each of the selected pilot locations.

If you don’t see a positive change, don’t panic. It could be due to the following reasons:

•  Customer satisfaction has declined across the board, due to other factors. If this is the
    case, the decline at your pilot locations should be less than at other locations. This is
    still good news because it means that your tactic was successful. However, you must
    now determine what caused satisfaction to decline across the board.

•  Your tactical implementation may need to be tweaked to be more effective. You may
    want to interview key stakeholders, including customers, to see how they perceive
    your new marketing or operational tactic and how it could be improved.

•  You may need to allow more time after the implementation to see an increase in 
    customer satisfaction. Some sales tactics have an immediate impact, while others are
    longer-term.

Since you know the correlation between customer satisfaction and revenue, you can predict how much revenue was generated as a result of each sales initiative. Then, use actual sales data to confirm your estimates.

In Closing

By following each of the steps listed in this tutorial, you will achieve unprecedented results by successfully increasing revenue by driving increases in customer satisfaction.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss this tutorial or any other aspect of customer strategy.

Receive email alerts when new content is added. No salesperson will call you – this is a free marketing information service.