Question

Title: Interpreting criteria: Customer and Market Focus and Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management

a. What does an organization do to measure customer needs, comments or areas for improvement?

b. How is information measured and analyzed and how does the organization review its performance?

Answer 1

Below is the list of what an organization can do to measure the customer needs, comments or areas for improvement:

1. Survey customers

The survey from customers on different products and services of the organization is the only probable way of gathering customer feedbacks unless customers contact you. There are several ways in which surveys can be pushed - Email, Public Websites, Phone calls, etc. One can conduct repeated surveys as per the need of the business.

2. Understanding customer expectations

By understanding the customer expectations, the organizations can receive a ground to satisfy the customers. Customer expectations can help measure how good organizations are performing in meeting customer expectations.

3. Finding where we are failing

Incidences where we know before that we failed, can be one of the ways by which we see the areas of improvement. Find out if we make promises that cannot be met. Knowing the communication chains to better understand the failures helps measure the areas for improvement.

4. Assess the competition

Considering the industry benchmark information on customer needs and satisfaction. Organizations must consider the brands which customers are buying and also understand what works for them. This will help the organization set priorities for customer satisfaction.

How is information measured and analyzed and how does the organization review its performance?

Management information systems help the organization capture all the information which is needed around​​​ customer needs and satisfaction. Any organization decides beforehand, different metrics for customer satisfaction and also the data systems to capture the same.

Most common metrics used for measuring customer satisfaction are NPS (Net promoter score) and Net relevance scores along with customer feedback on products and services. Both these metrics help the organization understand the customer sentiment at an aggregated level.

In order to capture these performance indicators or KPI's, the organization must decide on how we capture the information. While most common ways are asking customers the brand recommendation or satisfaction scores through Websites or call centers, one might also consider capturing the same through other channels as well.

Once the information is captured, they are measured against the set targets for customer satisfaction metrics. Performance variance is noted and remedial actions are planned so that we are on target for customer satisfaction.