This is a phrase from one of my favourite practitioners, John Seddon. He’s expressed the importance of customer satisfaction in a way that really drives it home for most people.

In the 80s I was working for a retail chain as a trainer and noticed that most of the department managers were telling the staff to ‘get the shelve filled and keep them filled’. As you can imagine, it was common to hear the staff say, “If it weren’t for all these customers, we could really get a lot of work done around here!”. Yikes! I saw a sarcastic poster in a ‘demotivation’ collection that read, “If we stop answering the phone, maybe these people will quit bothering us”.

We need to find our what our customers REALLY want and not ask them 3,219 questions about things that they either take for granted (was it the right product? Did it arrive on time? Was it packaged properly?). And they don’t want to fill in a survey. Period. You don’t like doing it – why would your customers want to? Give them a call and chat face-to-face to get the real goods. Ask them what they care about. You may be surprised to find out that you’re doing things for them that YOU thought they’d love, but in fact, they find it annoying.

Remember it costs 7 to 10 times as much money to find a new customer as it does to keep an existing one…pay attention and turn your customers into ‘Raving Fans’!

Know Quality, Know Profit…No Quality, No Profit

We have an easy-to-use customer satisfaction tool built into our Cloud-based Management System platform. If you’d like to see if it can help improve your customer data, schedule a demo. We’d be happy to spend 10 or 15 minutes with you to see if it’s a fit…

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