Customer Satisfaction Process Item 2: Involve Managers

Identify Managers

Your customer satisfaction process will be robust when the right people are involved. Ultimately, the process must help managers do their jobs better, so involve the managers who can benefit most from satisfaction information and improvement. These are the managers of processes that "touch" customers.

Managers of customer touchpoint processes include, for example, managers of customer service, tech support, sales, engineering and product design, marketing and advertising, and quality. Customer service people spend all day trying to keep customers happy, but in what ways do the other functions relate?

• Tech support is in the problem solving business - customers are happy when problems are solved. Track problem resolution.





• Sales people retain their customers by keeping them happy - they need information on likelihood of repurchase.





• Engineering and product design people create successful products only if customers like the new products. They need information on what improvements customers want.





• Marketing and advertising people create more convincing communications if they know what customers like about the current product and what customers view as important.





• Quality managers seek to improve processes by reducing variation and raising customer satisfaction. They manage process improvement in part by tracking key metrics. Many types of customer satisfaction information can be useful to them. Quality managers may be especially interested in tracking customer perceived problems.

Identify appropriate managers by examining your organization chart and noting which functions, such as those listed above, produce an output that is directly experienced by customers. This can be a revealing exercise!

Learn What Managers Need and Want

Contact these managers and learn the top things they want to know from customers. Have them frame key questions they would like answered by customers. With this input the customer satisfaction process will definitely generate customer information that is used and appreciated.

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