A 12 Point Total Customer Satisfaction Health Checkup
An article from OPI, Inc.

How healthy are the systems that  support Total Customer Satisfaction working in your company? This article offers self-diagnosis questionnaire for 12 key areas required to achieve Total Customer Satisfaction on an on-going basis.

1. Leadership Focus: Change is a top down process, so we start with leadership. Is the decision making process clear? What happens when one member of the leadership group disagrees with the rest—is it worked out, or is the individual overridden? How does the answer to the previous question change if the individual is the President, CEO, Chairman of the Board, VP of Finance?

...The point is, leadership must be a model for the rest of the organization. They watch your feet, not your lips.—Dr. Tom Peters.

 
2. Strategic Planning: Would a random selection of employees know your organization’s mission? If asked independently, would the leadership all give the same answer? When was the last time your board or leadership answered the question: What kind of organization will we be in 5 years? The point is, leadership determines the direction and destiny of the organization. Effective communication of this vision to a competent and motivated work force will take your organization to its future. Never tell people how to do things.

...Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want them to achieve and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.—General George S. Patton.

 
3. Leadership & Employee Development: Has it been over a year since the last management training for middle and senior managers? Do you receive regular complaints from employees about one or more managers? When was the last time you surveyed employee attitudes? One effective strategy is to involve managers in a forum where management issues are discussed in a facilitated session. This is a cost effective and hands on mode of learning. For small organizations, consider joining with other non competitive organizations to maximize the diversity of ideas and learning. The bottom line, provide management training.

4. Results: Employees are brought into focus as a key internal customer of management. Management is working more effectively as a group. Employees and managers are more involved with the daily business of the organization.

5. Continuous Improvement. What comes to mind when people think of Continuous Improvement? Tools, charts, and teams. The question is, are your employees ready to work in teams? Are your reward systems set up to recognize successful teams, or individual stars? Are your middle managers and supervisors comfortable with their new role within teams? Just as the leadership have to change their styles, employees must learn a new way of interacting with one another. They will have to learn a model for successful team process.

6. Fact Based Decision Making: If a committee or team did form, would they follow an accepted problem solving process? Is problem solving a euphemism for asking the boss how it has been done in the past? Does the organization have standard tools—for example, cost-benefit analysis, data gathering, data evaluation, decision making—and when was the last time employees were trained in these techniques?

...The real test is implementation: Does your organization deal with a problem once and for all? or does the problem tend to come up year after year?

 

7. Measurement and Monitoring: Is the data your organization collects tied to your short and long term goals? Do you periodically survey employees and clients? Is the data you collect presented in such a way that people can actually use it? Remember the saying: What you measure gets improved. If you measure how many customer complaint forms you get, you’ll get lots of forms. If you measure customer satisfaction, you’ll get satisfied customers.

8. Results: Is the  organization measuring progress toward achieving its mission? Disciplined teams use data from those measurements to correct problems or set new goals. Customers and employees alike are increasingly satisfied with the quality of goods and services coming from your organization.

9. Customer Focus. What we have described up to now are the basic requirements you must meet to keep your customers. These are not new ideas, fine tuning them and being more disciplined in their execution will help, but you will merely meet your customers expectations. The question is: Do you delight your customer? Do you lead the market in determining customer satisfaction? Do you benchmark to world class industry standards, or to the average in the local market?

10. Customer Satisfaction Process: Are your key business processes well documented and understood by the employees who work in them? Are documented business processes analyzed to improve the delivery of products and services?

...When a customer interacts with different departments, do they have the impression of dealing with entirely different companies? The point is, if everyone in your organization really knows how products and services are delivered to the customer, they can apply continuous improvement methods to the process.

 

11. Product and Service Innovation: When was the last time a significant new product or service. or new way of delivering product or service was introduced by your organization? Are you gaining market share over competitors? Do you have new competitors as a result of redefining your product or service? Continuous improvement is used to make sure what we do is done well, product and service innovation is used to keep us competitive and growing.

12. Change and Paradigm Shift. Change is tough work. Employee participation, for example, does not magically flow from developing a strategic plan and doing some leadership training. The missing ingredient is change in management behavior. The change is permanent. This is the way we should manage in crisis, and in good times—when an employee makes a mistake, and when they are doing everything just the way we would do it. Before starting the continuous improvement process, the leadership must be absolutely willing to make these changes. Without real change, there is no real improvement.