Customer Satisfaction Management

Vision:
Building a world-class company providing hosted solutions for small to medium businesses and become a No.1 application software company.

Mission:
To design quality, cost-effective, reusable, configurable, user-friendly, customer satisfactory solutions for small and medium businesses, and make their life easier so that they can concentrate on running their day to day businesses.
To achieve the same with latest technologies, high quality human resources, friendly, professional environment and distributed team.
To achieve the same with high growth every month for the company and for the employees as well.

I live in Virginia, United States - and I took a rental car from Enterprise Rental Car company and I was very happy with one of their gesture.

I and my brother-in-law called up this company's customer service and they said they will pick us up from our home and even drop us back to our home from the rental car place. Isn't that a wonderful feature or service they provide to the customers.

In fact, I was very happy about that feature - When someone is taking a rental car - 80% of the reason would be that the customer does not have a car, but he/she is licensed to drive and want to go places. So, considering this it perfectly makes perfect sense to have this service and I am sure many people will like this service.

If any other rental car company does not provide this service, please take this up. It is worth trying. BTW, I will go only to Enteprise, since they have pleased me!!:-)

Hi folks

This is Part 3 in a series of articles that discuss the process of creating an effective customer satisfaction survey for small to medium businesses. In Part 3, I describe a questionnaire structure for a customer satisfaction survey.

To measure customer satisfaction, small businesses need to design surveys that accurately capture customer perceptions about key service attributes that define their business. Questionnaire structure is key in making this measurement process a success. Success here is ofcourse defined by the quality of data that small businesses get out of such surveys. Data quality is directly dependent on the type of questions and answer options that make your questionnaire.

Here is a good questionnaire structure that you can use to measure your customer's satisfaction:

• The first question in your survey should always be an overall satisfaction question - For example, "Overall, how satisfied are you with the services offered by our restaurant?"
• The next few questions should measure your customer's satisfaction on key attributes that define your business - For example, "How satisfied are you with the quality of food in this restaurant?". Please note that here 'quality of food' is one of the attributes that define your business (See 'Customer Satisfaction Survey - Part 2' on how to define key attributes that describe your business)
• After the attribute questions, you need to ask specific questions (one or two) that measure customer loyalty and customer share of wallet - For example, "Would you visit this restaurant again?", "How many times have you visited this restaurant before?", "How often do you think you will dine at our restaurant?" etc.
• Finally you should ask an open-ended question - For example, "Please tell us what you liked/disliked about our restaurant?", "Please tell us how we can improve our service?" etc.

In Part 4, I will discuss different satisfaction question types, answer choices and scales. Stay tuned!

Dear Reader,

We represent - Customer Satisfied Technologies, a registered company in India.
We have one of our partner located in USA and another partner located in Australia. We have a sales office in Australia as well.

We are in the process of building Customer Related products, for helping small and medium businesses work with their customers smoothly.

We have almost completed our first product - SurveyMAC - a Hosted Survey Management System and it is in User Acceptance Phase.

We have many product ideas and new projects lined up. In total, we are a product and also a productized solution company.

Currently we are looking for students who are in final year or who have just passed out and looking for jobs in Madurai. If you are experienced that is well and good. If you are none of the above, please refer this article to your friend - please see the recruitment details below...

* Final Year Students or Freshers who have just finished their B.E., or B.Sc., Comp.Sci or MSc Comp Sci or MCA. - except for business development manager.
* Must be very much interested in programming.
* Preferred Working location is Madurai. But if you are located away, that is fine - we are open for working from home too, provided results are there.
* Good Written and Oral Communication Skills
* Right Attitude and High Aims in life.
* Proactive and Smart worker
* You can be good in one of the following -

Hire 1: Good in Java, J2EE and XML related technologies. - Enterprise Application Development Technologies.

Hire 2: Good in Web Design related technologies - PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux/Windows - WAMP or LAMP.

Hire 3: Creative in Web Design - Graphics Creation : CorelDraw / Adobe Illustrator etc. Image Editing, Special Effects : Adobe PhotoShop / MacroMedia Fireworks
Animation & Multimedia : MacroMedia Flash / Director / Adobe Premier
HTML Authoring, DHTML & CSS : DreamWeaver

Hire 4: Business Development Manager in Domestic market - India. - Must be an MBA for this position.

Please send in your mail to sselvan@gmail.com or vipin.vijayakumar@gmail.com, and have the subject as - Resume for Hire 1 etc., as applicable.

Thank You.

Please see more about us in Customer Satisfied Technologies.

Hi folks

This is my second article in a series of articles where I will discuss how a small/medium business can create effective customer satisfaction surveys. Here in Part 2, I discuss what you can do with the data/information that you collected from the brainstorming session and customer questionnaires (that I discussed in Part 1).

Before you start analysing the data to generate attributes that describe your business, you need to arrange your data in a logical order. For example, one point in the brainstorming session would be "Location of our business" and one point in your customer questionnaire would be something like "This restaurant is quite far away from public transport". Essentially both these points talk about the same service attribute - Convenience. So proper arrangement of your data is a pre-requisite for clear analysis of attributes.

Now you must be wondering, "Its going to be hard looking at all that data! I just don't have the time for this!". Well that is precisely what this article is all about. There are specific techniques which can be used for such open ended data analysis. One such technique is discussed step by step below. Note that this technique should take only an hour and would be more beneficial and more fun if there was a team (that is more than a single person).

First Half Hour

• First, take all the information/ customer comments and number them one by one, starting from 1. By doing this you have an idea of how many employee/customer comments you got.
• Next cut them out into thin strips of paper one by one (using a scissor etc.) and spread them on the table. Note that each strip of paper will have an employee/customer comment and a number on the left side such as 1, 2 etc. The numbers on the side help us to easily identify each strip.
• Next each person in the team should take a few strips of paper and start reading them quietly. While doing this each person should arrange their strips into groups in a logical way.
• Consider this example to be more clear: Jim is one of the team members in this exercise. He got 5 strips (out of a total of 20), these included----'5-Food is a key aspect of the servce at our restaurant', '15-I think the lobster here is excellent', '10-I would prefer a take away from your restaurant', '2-Delivery service adds value to our customers', '11-I waited a long time before I got my food'. Now Jim has to arrange these strips in some logical fashion. He quickly makes out that 5 and 15 talks about food, 2 and 10 talks about value added services, and 11 talks about waiting time.

Second Half Hour

• After you have grouped them into logical groups, each team member should tell the other team members what their groups are. There may be some groups of strips which are same, some very large groups, and some very small groups (as little as one or two).
• The main aim of this session should be to finalise a list of not more than 10 groups. So if there are small ones, try and incorporate them into a bigger group.

Now you might be wondering why not more than 10? Well from this exercise you may realise that you can come up with many different attributes that describe your business. But you cannot survey your customer and ask them to rate you on 50 different attributes, because let me tell you, they will be very dissatisfied at the end of your survey! 10 (or lesser) attributes will allow you to create a simple but effective customer satisfaction survey that measures your customer's satisfaction on key attributes that describe your business.

In Part 3, I will discuss how to design a customer satisfaction survey using the 10 attributes that you got from the above exercise.

Hi folks

This is my first blog for Customer Satisfied Technologies. Here I want to discuss how to create a quick and effective customer satisfaction survey to measure your customer's satisfaction. I want to split this into different parts to more logically explain the customer satisfaction measurement process. Here in Part 1, I will discuss what service attributes refer to and how you can effectively measure atributes related to your service.

There are numerous ways in which you can design a good customer satisfaction survey. But one of the most popular and effective methods is to design your survey by understanding specific attributes related to the service that you offer.

A service attribute can be defined as key aspects that relate to/explain the service you offer. If you perform poorly in any of the attributes related to your service, your service performance will suffer, and customers may not be fully satisfied.

For example, if you are a restaurant business, the main attributes that would explain your service would be quality of food, service at your restaurant, decor inside your restaurant, cost of food, staff behaviour towards your customers etc.

There are various ways in which a business can identify its service attributes. This may include customer focus groups, employee focus groups, secondary research through internet/other published sources, surveying your customers/employees etc. These can be done by either yourself or you can ask a third party market research company to do it for you.

Small to medium businesses may find it costly to use third party market research companies. The best way then, would be to do it yourself. Well, now you must be thinking, if only I had the time! How to cost effectively do it in quick time would be the question that ponders through every small to medium businesses' agenda to understand their customers.

Here is how you can quickly do it. The easiest way to do this is to brainstorm with your employees and management team first. This may take as little as one hour of your time, but you will be amazed at how much you get out of it. A simple agenda for the brainstorming session may be "What are the key service areas that describe our business?"

The next thing you can do is to ask a section of your customers. This can be done using a paper bases questionnaire, with two or three questions (maximum). The questions can be open ended so that customers tell what they feel about your business. Some example questions maybe - What aspects of our service do you think, are we performing well on?, What aspects of our service do you think, are we performing poorly on?, What aspects of our service do you think we can improve on? etc. The results from this questionnaire will give us an idea of what the customer thinks are aspects of your service.

In Part 2, I will discuss, what we can do with the data/information that you receive from your employees/management/customers about attributes related to your service.

Form Tighter Bonds With Customers:

Know how to replenish your customers' inventory.
Know what's on your customers' shopping lists, and what's going to be on them.
Know how customers perceive their needs. Often, it's not what you think.
Know what they've bought from other vendors, and how you stack up.
Reduce your costs via demand forecasting and tight customer integration.
Become your customers' long-term supplier.
Attract new customers and larger orders.

A customer's shopping list is their future shopping cart. It predicts what they will buy. You can get this prediction for tomorrow, next week, or next month, for example.

How can you differentiate between your satisfied customers and your loyal customers? Here are eight ways. They are equally relevant to your external customers as they are to your internal employee customers.

1.Pricing. You negotiate prices with satisfied customers. You negotiate costs with loyal customers.
2.Payment. Satisfied customer pay at their discretion. Loyal customers pay on time.
3.Referrals. Satisfied customers become referrals of your competitors. Loyal customers willingly provide referrals to you.
4.Turnover. Generally, you will experience turnover rates of 15% or higher of satisfied customers. The turnover rate of loyal customers will be less than 5% and will be for reasons out of your control.
5.Competitive data. Your satisfied customers are seeking competitive data. Your loyal customers are sharing competitive data.
6.Perception. Satisfied customers perceive you as a commodity provider. Loyal customers perceive you as a partner.
7.Contract. You will need a contract to keep many satisfied customers in place. You have a virtual lifetime contract with your loyal customers.
8.Difficult times. Satisfied customers will leave you. Loyal customers will stay by your side.

When Defect Tracking and Customer Support are integrated, companies find:

- Customer defects are identified and resolved faster.
- The cost of collecting defect data is greatly reduced.
- Development and QA engineers spend more time working on issues and less time collecting information about bugs and defects.
- When the defect is resolved, customers are notified more rapidly.
- Customer Support agent time is better used and productivity improves.
- Customer Support and Development use a common language and terminology, which makes their communication more effective.
- Comprehensive reporting and analysis of customer-related defects is now possible.

Today in our company are struggling with this problem. We need to integrate Customer Support System and Issue Tracking System, in order to reap the benefits.