Relaciones: Curiosidad, Prejuicio y Virtualidad

A general practical procedure for the analysis of customer satisfaction will consist of the following steps:

1. determination of the customer and the process leading from the company to the customer;

2. pre-segmentation of the customers;

3. determination of relevant quality attributes (parameters); 4. choice of competitors;

5. design of questionnaire; 6. sampling;

7. post-segmentation of customers based on results; 8. determination of quality types;

9. construction of quality maps; 10. determination of cost points;

11. determination of sales points and customer loyalty; 12. SWOT analysis;

13. determination of corrective actions.

The structure of the procedure is given in the flow chart in Figure 10.1

Fig. 10.1 Flow chart for general CSI analysis.

Fig. 10.2 Simple customer satisfaction.

Fig. 10.3 Dual customer satisfaction.

10.3.1 STEPS 1 AND 2

The first crucial step is to determine the customer and the process leading from the company to the customer. In certain simple cases we have a situation like the one described in Figure 10.2 where the company delivers goods and services to the end user and gets information back concerning the satisfaction.

In most cases, however, the situation is more like the one described in Figure 10.3 where the delivery consists of a chain of so-called middlemen before the goods and services reach the final customer.

It is crucial of course that from the start it is well-known what the delivery system looks like. It may lead to very wrong conclusions if one forgets certain parts of the chain as the following example illustrates.

A major cleaning company in New York had contracts for the cleaning of large building complexes with a large number of tenants in each. The level of cleaning and the prices were discussed not with the individual tenants but rather with a building manager who decided everything in relation to the contract with the cleaning company. The cleaning company never really considered the individual tenants as their customers, instead they focused on the building manager. For a long time this went well. From time to time the cleaning company called up the building manager and asked him about his satisfaction and usually he was satisfied because in most cases the cleaning company lived up to the contract. After a time, however, the tenants became more and more dissatisfied with the services they received. In the first case they did not say anything to the building manager, instead they gathered and decided that they wanted another cleaning company to do the job. A spokesperson went to the building manager and told him that they were not satisfied with the cleaning company and he was left with no other choice but to fire the cleaning company. The company of course could not understand this because as far as it knew it had lived up to the contract and its customer was satisfied. It learned its lesson, however, and in the future it never just considered the middleman as its customer. Instead it went out all the way to the end users and asked them about satisfaction and it used this information not just to improve its own services but also to keep the building manager informed about the situation.

To sum up, it is extremely important that the customer is clearly defined from the start. The process must be clear and the possible points of measurement must be identified.

Apart from this it should also at this stage be decided if customers should be segmented. In most cases customers do not constitute a homogeneous group. Different segments will require different treatments. Hence it will usually be necessary to split up customers in groups based upon the information which is already used within marketing, e.g. size of customer, private or public customer, location etc. In this case we can direct corrective action as close as possible to the individual customer.

10.3.2 STEP 3

Determination of relevant attributes is the next important step. It is very important that this takes place in co-operation with the customer. In too many cases companies themselves define what is relevant to the customer. This is a very bad idea because experience shows that very often companies only have a vague impression of what is really relevant to the customer. It follows from this that customers should participate in defining the relevant attributes and the best way of doing this is usually by setting up focus groups. Groups with approximately eight members are usually efficient if they are led by trained psychologists or moderators. The groups come up with a list of relevant parameters and this list will be the starting point for the next step in which a questionnaire is designed.

10.3.3 STEPS 4, 5 AND 6

In this group of steps the sampling takes place but first of all it must be decided whether competitors should be included in the analysis. In many cases it will be a great advantage to have competitors in the analysis but this will of course make the entire customer satisfaction analysis somewhat larger. Furthermore it may complicate the analysis because in some cases it will be difficult to find respondents who know both the company in question and the competitors.

Depending upon the decision concerning competitors a questionnaire must be designed. The size of the questionnaire should be kept to a minimum in order not to annoy the customers. We usually recommend that the number of parameters should not exceed 30. The questionnaire must be professional in appearance and in the case of businessto-business research a contact person must be identified.

10.3.4 STEPS 7 AND 8

Before constructing quality maps it will usually be a good idea to go through the collected material in order to let the data speak. First of all it is very useful to find out whether there are any segments in the material other than the ones already defined. This can be done by using a variety of statistical tools. If significant groupings are found, these groupings will also be used when reporting the final results.

Furthermore the material should also be analysed in order to find out what kind of quality the different parameters represent. Is it expected quality or perhaps value-added? To this end different techniques have been developed by different market research companies. This kind of information will be very important when evaluating the possible outcome of actions taken later on.

10.3.5 STEPS 9, 10 AND 11

The following step will be to introduce the quality map. This map is based upon the theoretical result above in which the optimum was found when the importance is equal to the satisfaction for each parameter. An example of such a map is given in Figure 10.4.

The map is constructed by plotting the importance on the horizontal axis against the satisfaction on the vertical axis. To reach optimum profit, theory then shows us that the parameters should be placed on the principal diagonal of this map.

Very often, however, decision makers are not as strict as this. Instead the map is divided into squares by dividing each axis into two, using the average importance and the average satisfaction as dividing points. These four squares are then used for decisions concerning actions. The two squares with either high/high or low/low are of course the squares in which the parameters have a correct placing. The other two squares are more problematic. If the importance is high and the satisfaction is low the company is faced with a serious problem which may lead to loss of customers in the future. Similarly if the importance is low and the satisfaction is high the company has allocated its resources in the wrong way. Being good at something which the customers do not evaluate means a loss of money. Instead these resources could be used for improving the situation in the high/low square.

The reasoning above depends of course upon the assumptions made in section 10.2. A very important assumption is that the costs of improving the satisfaction of a parameter are equal for each parameter. If this is not the case we have to establish a cost index in the company and use this index as a correction factor for each parameter. Then the horizontal axis will no longer be the importance of the parameters but instead the importance per unit of the costs. This is demonstrated in Figure 10.5 below.

Another way of improving the analysis would be to introduce ‘sales points’ or ‘loyalty points’ in the analysis to see if there are any differences between the importances established in the interview with the customer and the loyalty established from a different set of questions. This difference will usually reflect a difference between short-term and long-term importance of the parameters (see Kristensen and Mortensen, 1996).

Fig. 10.5 Quality map with the introduction of

costs.

In practice the loyalty points are constructed by using a series of questions concerning the loyalty of the customer towards the company. Will the customer buy again, recommend the company to others and similar questions. Using these questions it will then be possible, using statistical techniques, to determine the (short-time) loyalty effect of each parameter. The results may then be communicated as shown in Figures 10.6 and 10.7 below, depending upon whether competitors are included in the analysis or not.

These maps may be interpreted in the same way as the quality maps. The difference is that they tend to separate the short-term corrections from the more long-term corrections. There is no doubt that the theoretical results above should be followed but the loyalty maps will help you to find the best sequence of improvements by selecting the parameters with the worst relative position (satisfaction/importance) and highest loyalty effect first.

Fig. 10.6 Effect on loyalty and relative

position.

Fig. 10.7 Effect on loyalty and competitor

10.3.6 STEP 12

The entire discussion until now has been on an operational basis. But the results of a customer satisfaction survey should also be used at the strategic level. The quality map is a perfect instrument for this. Usually strategic discussions will take place using a SWOT analysis, i.e. identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Using the quality map the SWOT elements can be identified as shown in Figure 10.8 below.

Of course the threats will be found where the importance is high combined with a low satisfaction and strengths will be where both are high. Actions concerning these two are not very different at the strategic level from the operational level. It is somewhat different when we consider the other two elements of the figure. From an operational point of view the actions will be to adjust the parameters in this part of the map in such a way that they will be concentrated in the low/low part. This will not necessarily be the case when we consider the map from a strategic point of view. From this point of view parameters in this part of the map should not exist or rather they should all be changed to become strengths. In this case the parameters with a high degree of satisfaction are our opportunities. With these parameters we are already performing well and consequently the job will be to convince our customers that this group of parameters is important to them. Concerning the low/low parameters these may strategically be seen as weaknesses. We are not doing very well. On the other hand the parameters are not very important but if the situation changes and customers change their evaluation then the parameters may become a threat. This could easily happen if our competitors find out that we do not perform very well in these cases. They may then try to convince the customers about the importance of the parameters and all of a sudden we are left with a threat.

Fig. 10.8 SWOT analysis based on a customer

satisfaction survey.

REFERENCES

Hoinville, G. and Jowell, R. (1982) Survey Research Practice, Heinemann Educational Books, London.

Kristensen, K., Dahlgaard, J.J. and Kanji, G.K. (1992) On measurement of cus-tomer satisfaction,

Total Quality Management, 3(2), 123–8.

Kristensen, K. and Martensen, A. (1996) Linking customer satisfaction to loyalty and performance,

Research Methodologies for the New Marketing, ESOMAR Publication Series, vol. 204, 159–

70.

Moser, C.A. and Kalton, G. (1981) Survey Methods in Social Investigation, Heine-mann Educational Books, London.

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