Fostering a positive customer culture

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Last week we looked at reviewing objectives and developing strategies. This week we continue to look at a programme of activities for the implementation of a plan.

On a smaller scale, there are lots of things that can be done to foster a customer orientation among staff:

• communicating information about customers’ needs
• arranging visits by staff to customers' premises, or visits by the customers to talk to staff
• inducting new staff so that the importance of a customer orientation is emphasised from the start
• observing and giving constructive feedback on episodes of customer service
• encouraging and praising staff who have done that bit extra to satisfy a customer
• holding debriefing meetings after particular incidents of customer dissatisfaction to share information about what went wrong and to work out what could be done to ensure it does not happen again; that is, learning rather than blaming
• identifying and providing training, for instance in telephone manner or other communication skills.

The failure of many organisations to satisfy their customers rarely occurs because they did not know what they should have been doing, but because they never put it into practice.

Sometimes the gap between excellent plans and what actually happens is so great that the organisations themselves fail. The path to customer orientation is littered with the career hopes of managers who believed in it but never got round to doing much about it.

For the purpose of your personal action plan to improve customer satisfaction, what matters is that your approach to customer orientation is permanently built into your role and agenda.

We hope that one of the messages of this blog so far has been that you do not think about your customers only at some special occasion or annual planning stage, but that their needs are always in your mind, shaping your priorities and actions.

We have been deliberately positive about the difference you can make to customer satisfaction. We have considered the other orientations that customer orientation has to compete with in reality. We have provided you with a framework for a personal action plan to help you achieve increased customer satisfaction. We hope that you share this genuine belief that you can make a difference.

Key points

• Customer orientation competes with technology, product, producer, financial, sales, managerial and professional orientations.
• Dissatisfied customers damage organisations because of the costs they give rise to and the influence they have on future sales and programmes.
• A customer's estimate of how satisfied they are comes from their comparison of what they expected to receive with what they perceive they have received.
• Customers have a zone of tolerance within which organisations can operate in order to satisfy them.
• A planning framework typically comprises:
  • corporate objectives
  • an audit
  • a SWOT analysis
  • assumptions
  • specific/departmental objectives and strategies
  • a programme of activities
  • measurement and review.
• Acquiring, disseminating and responding are the three stages of handling information about customers.
• SWOT is a valuable tool to identify strengths and weaknesses in customer relations, and opportunities for, and threats to, improving them.
• It is important to set SMART objectives in planning:
  • — specific measurable
  • — agreed
  • — realistic
  • — timed.
• Fostering a customer orientation among your staff is an important management role.