AlliedInput

Effectiveness measurement needs to evolve beyond technical and objective metrics to the measurement of perception. Why? Businesses can boast superior efficiency, meet stated service-level agreement (SLA) objectives and exceed all product functional requirements yet still suffer from the customers perceptions of a lack of alignment and noneffectiveness. It is not enough to solicit the list of issues, demographics and customers satisfaction ratings. To really be effective a business needs to know how the customer’s needs are prioritized and this can only be done through measuring importance. Just remember:

• If it’s NOT important to your customer’s, should you focus on it?
• If it IS important to your customers, shouldn’t it also be a key priority to you?

Is the redundancy in questioning really worth the effort?

By asking both satisfaction and importance, the ultimate outcome is an ordering of the customer’s needs and issues affecting their perception along the axes of satisfaction and importance (see the following figure).

Source: AlliedInput

Figure. Importance + Satisfaction = Impact

Where satisfaction is low, businesses should focus resources on areas indicated as high importance. However, businesses are cautioned that company priorities are seldom specific business or customer priorities. At the risk of banality, AlliedInput emphasizes that the two groups speak very different languages. Areas of low importance should not be ignored, because their relative importance can increase next year as high-priority areas are remedied and business needs change.

Where satisfaction is high, businesses should keep resources employed. Failure to do so will quickly result in a drop in the lower right corner of the quadrant and potentially an increase in costs. In areas of lower importance, businesses should seek sources of redeployment in opportunities through retraining, retooling or retirement.

In some situations, the solution is not a reactive fix, but an interactive response. Changing the expectations of the customer and key stakeholders can result in an improvement in satisfaction where changing the services and/or products delivered is determined to be too costly or impossible.

In some cases, a problem may be of secondary importance and, thus, not qualify for expanded resource expenditure or accelerated scheduling. Budgetary constraints, political or technical risk, lack of a clear-cut or available solution, or a negative impact on an ongoing program or project make it more prudent to change the expectations of the stakeholder rather than to go on a quest that could do more harm than good.

Fatal Flaw - Failure to Ask for Importance Weighting: Result — No Prioritization

Another common error of a satisfaction survey is not including respondent importance weightings. Many organizations apply importance weighting to respondent data after the fact, but this will result in missing the opportunity to focus action plans and IT efforts on the criteria that will have the greatest impact on respondents’ satisfaction.

Conclusion

Ultimately, effective methods of measuring customer perceptions and managing their expectations include various forms of marketing to the customer population, training and refocusing customer facing employees, streamlining services and product offerings, implementing customer requested updates and clearly establishing the role of customer relationship managers.