Is your customer satisfied with you?
I guess if they are not satisfied, would they continue to buy from us and do business with us?
And why won’t he be pleased?
There are two answers above.
First of all, as the company official says, “I suppose you are satisfied,” it shows whether he is satisfied or not.
“If they are not satisfied, would they continue to do business with us?”
His answer in question form does not reflect the truth.
Because the customer could not find an alternative, he may be continuing to work even though he is not satisfied with you right now.
But if he’s not satisfied, he’s actively or passively looking for an alternative.
In the form of sending an e-mail to companies that may compete with you, inviting the company for a meeting or receiving an offer, which we call active alternative search,
passive alternative search means that even though there is no physical search, they can immediately evaluate the offers they receive.
As a result, it means that if your customer is not satisfied with you, they will immediately start working with the alternative supplier as soon as possible.
Large companies continue to work with this supplier for a while, even if they are not satisfied with their supplier and find an alternative, but they gradually reduce the amount of work they give to this supplier, shifting them to the other supplier. They do not suddenly leave this supplier and switch to an alternative supplier. The reason is that the new supplier gains time to develop itself and the parent company understands that it will fully trust the new supplier. In the meantime, they do not say anything to the supplier they are not satisfied with so that this supplier does not act emotionally and stop working suddenly.
So why wouldn’t any company (customer) be satisfied with its supplier?
Normally the customer has three requests?
1- The product or service will be of the desired quality
2- The product or service will be in an acceptable price / fee range
3- The product or service will be delivered within the time interval requested by the customer.
These three items cover roughly 80% of customer satisfaction (why if you say 80%, I put an intermediate value because it is certain that it is not below 50% and above 90%, otherwise it is not based on any scientific research result, but entirely based on experience).
However, it is unlikely that you will meet all of this 80 percent in practice.
Product and service quality may not always be 100 percent. Because the variability in the flow of life constantly changes the parameters that affect the product and service quality, it is very difficult to achieve the same quality each time (or, more accurately, to ensure quality continuity).
If the product or service is not within the acceptable price / price range, you are already in trouble and cannot do business or you can only do short-term / temporary work.
Even if you give a price within the desired range, you may still experience problems from time to time, as the customer wants to keep their costs under control / constantly reduce their costs. Especially if the price you have given is at the upper limit of the range that the customer can accept.
The delivery of the product or service in the time interval the customer wants is also almost impossible to achieve 100 percent performance, as the product is delivered to the customer as a result of many variable activities. Of course, this may not be the case if your customer buys in stock and works with stock.
When you cannot meet these three demands 100%, you need to get some of the other 20% satisfaction share.
When we say what these are;
The biggest share should be in communication in my opinion.
As a supplier, the level and quality of your communication with the customer is extremely effective in customer satisfaction. Sometimes it can even get ahead of the other three parameters, especially in old or small companies.
The form of communication you have established while talking to the customer, whom we call communication, on the phone Does the supplier speak sincerely and sincerely? Does the company sacrifice its benefits and help when necessary? Is it constructive in solving problems or is it extremely strict by putting forward agreements.
Ease and speed of reaching the person who will be interested in the supplier when the customer calls. The speed of communication is extremely important, especially for small and non-corporate customers. While the corporate customer sends an e-mail and welcomes the response the next day, the small or non-corporate customer may want to talk on the phone immediately or receive a reply to the mail within an hour.
Using the communication method preferred by the customer (sometimes by phone, sometimes face-to-face, sometimes by mail, in writing)
Therefore, communication is one of the important parameters for customer satisfaction.
Apart from these, concepts that may affect customer satisfaction can be included in one of the four satisfaction scopes mentioned above.
For example, sending with the packaging that the customer wants, the label or branding information requested by the customer on the product, the product quality,
When buying 5 instead of three, the discount rate can be included in the product price.
Let’s talk about measuring customer satisfaction;
First of all, if the customer works with your company or continues to buy products from you, it does not mean that they are satisfied with you. We learned that.
How will we learn if the customer is satisfied with us?
You can intuitively see whether the customer is satisfied or not from their approach and behavior towards you, but when we try to measure this, the most used method is the survey method.
Survey method can be done either face to face or by sending a questionnaire via mail.
There are now also online survey methods. These can also be used.
It is important to make sure that the questionnaire is evaluated and answered in the right hands, whether it is done face-to-face or sent by mail.
You can do this by informing before sending the questionnaire and by the information letter on the questionnaire or even by phone.
The answer to the question of what will happen if the right person does not evaluate it, of course, you will not get the correct information, but further, filling the questionnaire with a full score (i.e. giving 5 out of 5 for all questions, or on the contrary, giving 1 out of 5 for all questions will also disrupt the statistics of the whole survey.)
As for the preparation of the survey;
Since the questionnaires are usually documents prepared without specifying names or means of obtaining information, it is important to know the opinions of each customer about us individually and since the person who filled out the questionnaire and the company who sent the questionnaire can be known who and which company the company name on the questionnaire, the name of the person filling the questionnaire. must have a surname and position within the company.
Subsequent questions should be within the 4 scopes I have written above.
1- Product or service quality
2- Product or service price / fee
3- Delivery performance of the product or service
4- Communication method
In product or service quality, questions such as whether the product has the quality spectrums desired by the customer, product life, product functionality, product packaging should be placed separately.
Fraudulent questions may be asked about the price / price of the product or service, such as how you evaluate the product / price performance we offer / purchase from us. Otherwise, when you say in what range the price of the product should be, many answers may point to the lowest value.
Although the product or service delivery performance can sometimes decrease due to the customer who requested you late, you should ask them to consider this issue as well.
In the form of communication, which type of communication tools do you prefer, in what order? Do you know the person who deals with your company (Product customer manager or Key account), how do you find their approach to you.
Evaluation criteria 1-3 or 1-5 are good for evaluation. It does not make sense for surveys that require an intuitive result to climb into evaluation criteria such as 1-10.
In some subjects, especially for issues and suggestions that require improvement, you should get explanations, not numerical evaluations, and define the places where they will write the explanations on the questionnaire.
After receiving the survey results, the evaluation will be made for each client.
You should evaluate it separately and announce the explanations made especially for the aspects that need improvement to the relevant departments.
Apart from these, by transferring all evaluation results to an excel table, by making a statistical evaluation. You should determine which part the customer is most satisfied with and which parts are dissatisfied.
In cases where there are a large number of customers, sometimes one or more customers fill the questionnaire with the highest score or the lowest score, and this evaluation may be excluded from the statistical evaluation of the survey as it is not logical and will change the statistical result.
You can achieve this with a procedural structure such as, for example, that the customers with the lowest score in the 3% segment and the highest score of 3% customers are not evaluated statistically.
Of course, you should talk to the customer who gave a low score, not a high score, and ask why he gave such a low score to the entire survey. Sometimes even this inquiry can lead to good loyalty for this client.
After the statistical evaluation of the questionnaires
Highest rated items of satisfaction
The lowest scored dissatisfaction items
Levels of these items last year and percentages of improvement or deterioration
The reasons for these improvement and deterioration percentages should be determined and published to everyone involved in a report.
Since publishing the places where we have been in a bad situation in the report shows us where we need to take action and fix
Publishing the places where we are in good condition is also important in terms of providing the opportunity to appreciate the people and departments that caused this improvement and to continue this improvement and to spread it to other departments and issues.