Do Business Well

When an electronic products company started its email marketing program, it quickly discovered that it had a lingering problem with dissatisfied customers. The company had promised a free giveaway as an incentive to get customers to register their product. But due to a problem with the fulfillment house, the gifts were not sent out on a regular basis. A number of customers who were annoyed that they hadn’t received their free gift began taking advantage of email to talk back to the company. The company had had no previous direct contact with these—or any other—customers and didn’t even know that the problem existed. Needless to say, the company now pays careful attention to its inbound email and also runs frequent surveys as ways to listen and learn from its customers.

Becoming a listening and learning organization may require a cultural adjustment, but most companies can achieve a lot by implementing these simple business procedures, which focus on capturing information and data from all customer interactions. Let’s take a brief look at some of them.

1. Establish cross-departmental distribution of customer feedback. Listening to your customers means that everyone in your

Organization must be able to hear what they’re saying, whether they work in the technology group, marketing, customer service, merchandising, or elsewhere.

2. Provide easy, online access to all campaign results and customer satisfaction reports. You may choose to implement a Web- based application that allows appropriate people across your organization to access a weekly customer status report, or you may email it around to everyone. Either way, the input and results provided by your customers should inform and govern the way a broad section of your organization thinks.

3. Tie customer satisfaction to employee reward and compensation. High customer satisfaction may mean that you can hire more personnel, get more resources for your project, or even compensate yourself and your employees better. Making customer satisfaction—not just revenue—matter sends a powerful message to your customers.

4. Tie customer loyalty and long-term value to employee reward and compensation. Although customers may like something they bought, are they coming back to buy again? If you tie both loyalty and long-term value (as well as customer satisfaction) to employee compensation you’ll create a culture that understands that you don’t just need happy customers—you need happy customers who generate lots of value.

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