Five Best Practices for Exceeding Customer Expectations

951 Words4 Pages
1. Listen to your customer through customer surveys and focus groups 2. Set aggressive, but realistic goals and metrics to push people to stretch 3. Use CRM technology to innovate how to best serve your customers 4. Transform business processes 5. Capture and apply lessons learned Best Practice #1: Listen to Your Customers Most everyone would agree that listening to customers is essential to an organization’s success. While the importance of listening to your customers is obvious, many organizations fail to fully listen and understand what customers are trying to tell them. The key to understanding your customer is in providing feedback mechanisms and processes that will enable you to understand more about your customer than they do themselves. Customer satisfaction surveys and focus groups are two popular methods for listening to customers. Customer Satisfaction Surveys Research indicates that independent customer satisfaction surveys are the first step to measuring your organizations ability to meet and exceed customer expectations for service. It is the most common best practice tool that is used by organizations to capture customer feedback. Focus Groups Listening to your customers in direct feedback sessions is another best practice and when utilized in conjunction with customer satisfaction surveys can be a very powerful communications tool. Focus groups provide an opportunity to strengthen customer ties by forming stronger one-on-one customer relationships. They provide an opportunity to drill down more deeply into specific issues with customers and to capture levels of understanding not available in a survey format. Focus groups also offer an opportunity for organizations to identify ideas that can be applied to future product development and organization planning and strategy. By working closely with your customers, you will gain increased
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