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Shelter Chieza Change Management
One of the major challenges I have experienced in my professional life is ensuring customer satisfaction. Human beings are naturally difficult to please because of their diverse tastes or preferences. One thing I have learnt is that customer satisfaction should not be solely based on a customer’s smile or gesture neither should it be based on an income statement, or the cash-flow statement or the balance sheet.

It is also a challenge determining when to do it. For one to measure something, you need to collect the most accurate data, draw correct inferences and conclusions.

As a company, you may fail to deliver what you would have promised to the customer. How you react to that failure will determine what a customer will do. They can stay with you or move to your competitor.

I believe customer satisfaction is a process. Customer satisfaction normally comes about after a customer has consumed something and they are completely satisfied with the experience.

You can also view customer satisfaction as a process which must be reached from a certain point of differentiation.
Generally, if you satisfy a customer, they are bound to come back again, they become loyal to you and this produces numerous spiralling effects that have a positive effect on your business.

There are a lot of companies that refuse to accept goods returned by customers while others turn a blind eye to complaints, if a customer returns malfunctioning product valued at US$40 and a company fails to exchange the product chances are it will lose not just that customer but other potential customers.

I often marvel at companies that use questionnaires to measure customer satisfaction. The hotel industry is one such sector. The moment a customer checks out they are asked to fill out a form to rate how satisfied they are with the product?

For each question the guest has to choose a specific rating excellent, very good, good, fair satisfactory, poor and very poor.
This is a very generalised way of measuring the level of satisfaction. For instance, the quality of food may have been excellent, but the portion quantities and delivery may have been below standard.

Companies cannot expect respondents to divide these dimensions in their head, weight them on importance, then provide an accurate aggregate rating.

I believe that hotels can do more, possibly broaden their questionnaire to zero in on specific issues, which will result in them extracting meaningful data from guests.

For instance, if the questions are specific a hotel might discover that of the 95 percent who believed the food was excellent, 60 percent believe the price was unreasonably high.

A manager would be in a better position to give actionable highlights to make the price more affordable or to make price adjustments.
I personally prefer a quality survey to a customer satisfactions survey, it gives quality and better decision-making options.
Being a customer is never easy, you are bombarded with a lot of choices and specials and in such instances the customer buys from the person with the most appealing product or service.

Companies must respond to customer loyalties more than ever before. New competition is sprouting like mushrooms and information is now readily available to the customer like never before.

So it is only those companies that anticipate customer needs and expectations and respond to their concerns that will stay ahead of the pack

Till next week may God richly bless you.

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