The vast majority of companies in North America measure their customer satisfaction performance — nearly 90 percent of all businesses, according to one recent survey. Yet just half of those companies take their customer satisfaction data and share it with their employees. Even fewer — a mere 8 percent — close the loop with customers to let them know how the company has responded to their feedback.
The lack of action on customer feedback can result in missed opportunities for more revenue, said a speaker at Tuesday’s meeting of the CompTIA IT Services and Support Community. The session was part of the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting this week in San Diego.
“Do we ever stop to think about customer satisfaction from the standpoint of revenue?” Jean Mork Bredeson, president, SERVICE 800, asked the audience. “We should be focusing on the relationship and the correlation to revenue as well.”
Too often, Bredeson said, companies don’t realize that the tools and resources they have available can be used in different ways. Customer satisfaction data is a prime example.
“Most companies will correlate data to other factors, such as response time, solution time and professionalism of their staff,” she said. “But organizations struggle to track customer satisfaction with the revenue that comes in the door.”
Bredeson advises companies to find a way to correlate customer satisfaction ratings, characteristics and other productive statistics to actual revenue received. This can be done by discovering what specific conditions drive customer to spend.
Each customer is different. Some may be interested in shorter hold times on the phone; others in faster fix times; and still others, the professionalism of the service provider’s employees. Regardless of the driver, companies can use this information to re-examine their priorities and reallocate resources to seize new revenue opportunities.
“More money, actual dollars, can be driven into the business by making improvements in the areas that customers are most interested in,” Bredeson concluded. “There’s gold in your customer satisfaction program.”
Steven Ostrowski is CompTIA’s director of corporate communications.
