Jul
20
How To Measure Customer Satisfaction
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There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to measuring customer satisfaction, because it very much depends on the type of business that you are running and the type of customers that you have. After all, if you are operating a business where customers use you as a ‘one off’ then you will have very different customer satisfaction requirements to companies that need to have a very stable customer base.
So there are essentially 3 main issues to be considered before you decide on how you will measure customer satisfaction.
What IS customer satisfaction?
First of all it is important to understand exactly what is meant by customer satisfaction. It is obviously a feeling or state of mind, not something that is objective. Customers will use different criteria to ‘judge’ your company, so there are different yardsticks that will have to be used to measure customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction may also mean different things to different businesses, for example will your customers be satisfied with the products you supply, or with your speed of delivery, with your customer care service, with your price, or is it about an ongoing business service that you provide to them?
What kind of system to use
When thinking about what kind of customer satisfaction system to use it is important to think about how the information that you gather will be used. If you do nothing with the results then it is a pointless exercise, but if you use the results to make sure that you improve levels of customer satisfaction then it will be beneficial to your company.
You will also need to think about how the information will be used to take action so that you can not only retain your existing customers, but also attract and then retain new ones.
What measures to use
Consideration also has to be given to exactly how you will define customer satisfaction. If you merely ask people if they were satisfied with the service, then you are failing to elicit information about any weaknesses within it and so you will not improve the system.
So you need to clearly understand the expectations that your customers have and what they want from you, in order to feel satisfied.
Beginning the progress
Once you have established what is satisfaction what kind of system you should use and which measures to use, you can then start the process of measuring customer satisfaction, simply by talking to your customers, either through emails, phone calls, letters, forms etc. However, vital to this process is consistency; you need to use the same questions with all the customers that you contact.
Often the response rate can be poor, but sometimes rather than asking a whole range of questions you can ask a few when you send out an email or contact a customer. Remember that your customers are probably quite busy people and they will often not wish to participate in a really lengthy questionnaire. So weed out all the questions that are not of vital importance and keep the number of questions to a minimum.
One trick to attract responses is to offer an incentive. So when responses are received in they will be entered into a draw and the winner will receive a gift or cash reward; this tends to ensure a better response.
The final way to measure customer satisfaction is to make sure that you repeat the exercise on a regular basis, so that you can make comparisons about how you are doing and what you are getting right and any areas where you may be getting it wrong.
Jul
20
How Could Your Purchasing Team Improve Efficiency By Using B2B Tools
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How can B2B tools help the purchasing team? Well to begin with, B2B tools simply cut down on the time that the purchasing team have to spend sourcing items. This can now be done electronically which will ensure that there is a significant reduction in the time taken to process the whole purchasing transaction.
In a way the B2B tools offer businesses the opportunity to have an electronic marketplace. They can have a list of suppliers, a list of requirements and the two can be matched as and when required, without having to go through a long process of procurement. Obviously suppliers have to be approved and have to qualify to be on the list of suppliers, but once suppliers are then the whole process of procurement becomes more automated and therefore less time consuming.
This may not sound like a massive saving in terms of time, but when you consider that historically this had to be done by telephone, letter and emails, it ate up significant amounts of time, that had to be added to the finished product in terms of cost. Now the time saved results in more time for the purchasing team to be able to source goods at a really competitive price, so costs are constantly driven low.
Currently, the process is automated to a large extent and the supply chain becomes much more responsive to the needs of the purchasing team. This is important because the overall needs of the purchasing team need to be taken into account. It is not generally enough to have 100 items delivered on a specific date; the 100 items have to meet all quality control requirements.
Utilising B2B systems can ensure that these quality control requirements are built in to the procurement process, so the whole process of purchasing has quality built in as an integral part, therefore reducing the number of defects and returns.
Over the last 10 years B2B tools have become more sophisticated (and expensive to deploy). Any implementation requires close collaboration with existing supplier base – This obviously requires a great deal of trust between the supplier and the customer. With more and more businesses adopting standards based tools to do business and with the growth of industry portals to support trading (Exostar for example in the Defence and aerospace sector) B2B is no longer merely a tool for larger organizations. Indeed various tools and techniques (such as of strategic use of purchasing cards) offer a low risk, low cost introduction to B2B.
Collaboration with the supply chain has extended from the execution of orders into various aspects from forecasting through to VMI and inventory management – whilst businesses of all sizes see the benefits the growth in this sector will continue for years to come.