Discovering What Your Customers Want

Overview/Description
 The data are in, and there's no doubt about it: The return on customer loyalty goes directly to your company's bottom line. Too often, however, organizations seeking to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty begin with a survey. To build a successful customer satisfaction system, you have to begin with the basics. When customer satisfaction programs begin with a survey, and not a plan, the result is frequently customer dissatisfaction. To overcome this risk, you must begin by developing a customer satisfaction system before you develop the survey. In this course, you'll explore the bottom-line payoffs for building customer satisfaction. You'll discover the elements of an effective customer satisfaction system. Most important, you'll learn how to discover what your customers want before you try to measure whether you're delivering it.

Target Audience
 Marketing executives, managers, and professionals with responsibility for customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as all employees who contribute to the customer loyalty chain

Expected Duration
2.5 hours

Lesson Objectives:

Building the Customer Satisfaction System

  • recognize benefits of planning a customer satisfaction system before undertaking a customer satisfaction survey.
  • match the three kinds of criteria customers use to evaluate products to appropriate examples of each.
  • identify key elements in an effective customer satisfaction system.
  • analyze a customer satisfaction system to determine the consequences of one or more missing elements in a given business scenario.

    • When Customers Complain

  • recognize the value of learning from customer complaints and lost customers.
  • select business responses most likely to prevent loss of a complaining customer.
  • match key elements of an effective complaint-tracking system with their purpose.
  • apply techniques for making lost-customer interviews in a given business scenario.

    • Applying the Critical-incident Approach

  • recognize values of determining critical product and service attributes as a basis for understanding customer expectations.
  • sequence the steps in the critical-incident approach.
  • apply principles for conducting a critical-incident interview in a given scenario.

    • Moving from Incidents to Customer Requirements

  • recognize the importance of consolidating interview data into attributes and expected benefits.
  • identify key steps in culling attributes from critical incidents.
  • identify attributes that have been assigned to appropriate expected-benefit categories.

    • Course Number: CUST0131