The ‘pursuit of excellence’ will many times fail to include your company’s management process for measuring and managing customer satisfaction.  ‘Voice-of-the-customer’ feedback is certainly critical to directing improvement processes, but most companies use unreliable or invalid data.  Any company that is serious about being customer-focused, and delivering true, world-class quality, must themselves be world-class in their approach to customer satisfaction measurement (CSM).  Unfortunately, many myths exist on this topic that hinder companies from becoming world-class in their CSM aspirations.

MYTH:  Our salespeople know what customers expect and whether they are satisfied or not.

FACT:  Social situations distort accurate communication.  Obviously good communication between salespeople and clients is important.  But salespeople hear customers through a perceptual filter.  A natural bias in all forms of human communication.  Dependence on suppliers may prevent customers from saying what they are really feeling.

MYTH:  We track customer satisfaction through our complaint system.

FACT:  Complaints do not track customer satisfaction very well at all.  Complaining customers are almost always unrepresentative of all customers and all types of problems that are actually occurring.  Research has shown over and over again that most dissatisfied customers don’t complain, they simply switch to a new supplier.  Companies who try to make it easy for customers to complain may actually increase the number of complaints received, making it look as if customer satisfaction is getting worse when it may actually be getting better.

MYTH:  Customer satisfaction influences business performance.

FACT:  Market-perceived relative quality, not customer satisfaction, is correlated to profitability.  We must look beyond our own customers to the total market in order to understand profitability.  The customer is the final judge of quality (ie, perception is reality).  Relative quality means compared to competitive choices.  Quality perceptions capture the degree to which we are exceeding expectations, ‘delighting’ the customer, achieving excellence, etc.  ‘Satisfaction’ does not set the standard high enough.  ‘Satisfaction’ is more event-specific.  ‘Satisfaction’ relates to minimum requirements.  ‘Satisfaction’ is easy to achieve.  Therefore, ‘customer satisfaction’ is best used as a generic term.

MYTH:  Customer satisfaction means doing whatever it takes to keep the customer happy, regardless of cost.

FACT:  Your ability to establish, maintain, and build customer relationships depends on the perceived value of your offering.   Your goals should not merely maximize quality, but optimize it.

MYTH:  Customer satisfaction depends on doing one or two things correctly.

FACT:  Every interaction a customer has (ie, a face-to-face encounter with an employee, the appearance of your business card, your logo, how you answer the phone, all the way to whether or not your carpet has been vacuumed, and a thousand other points) is a reflection on (perceived) quality.  We need to evaluate performance in all areas of interactions with customers.  THIS IS HUGE, and is affectionately termed ‘Moments of Truth’.      

MYTH:  The purpose of customer satisfaction is to retain customers.

FACT:  Customer satisfaction is concerned with attracting, keeping, and enhancing customer relationships.  Achieving customer attraction, retention, and enhancement leads to market share dominance, which has been shown to be linked to business performance.  Therefore, the target of CSM is behavior, not attitude.  Measure behavioral intentions and correlate them with actual behavior over time.

You want to dominate?  Take a long hard look at how your organization stacks up to these points.  Changes some things around in your company, if need be.  And be patient.  For some organizations, these philosophies will challenge them to the very core of their being.  Once decided to leap, it will not happen overnight.