Customer Satisfaction

There is growing comment and editorial, which underplays customer satisfaction as a means to achieving customer loyalty. Imonic don't subscribe to this view, in fact we believe customer satisfaction to be a critical element in effectively managing customers in order to maximise their value to your organisation.

As you can see from our review and synthesis of research on the reasons "why customers are loyal", customer satisfaction is fundamental. (Refer: Imonic Views customer loyalty). What's more, even if you have the basics of your service and QCD (quality, cost, delivery) well under control, customer satisfaction merely moves to a higher and higher level. (Refer to interaction management).

It is our view that if you really want to succeed in satisfying your customers, you should be working on all of these areas: management of tailored customer preferences; communications and contact effectiveness; how easy you are to do business with; how well you resolve issues, report to customers and develop relationships.

Of course, even this approach to customer satisfaction is relative. You will never satisfy customers completely since when provoked they will always find areas of "relative" under performance. It is therefore a matter of understanding what is important to individual customers and building this into your approach.

Gaining customer satisfaction data is also a multi channel affair - the more roads into the organisation the better. Then comes the measurement of customer satisfaction (refer to customer satisfaction surveys). This in our view is essential to effecting improvements, which are driven by customers and will impact customers. Once completed however, the situation won't remain static. Customers are always changing, you are changing and of course competitors are always changing too. The importance of managing customer satisfaction well - and repeatedly - cannot be underplayed as a means to maximise share of wallet and develop account loyalty.