Most companies understand that customer satisfaction and loyalty are essential to their success. But few companies know how to link their customer’s needs with their organization’s processes to create the best customer experience possible. Instead, they erect walls between their customer service department and their other organizational functions. Improving Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Profit shows managers how to break down these walls, find out what their customers want, and use that information to produce the kinds of products and services that will keep them coming back. Michael Johnson and Anders Gustafsson have been instrumental in the development of customer satisfaction indexes in the U. S. and Europe. Here they team up to introduce a five-stage process that establishes crucial connections between a company’s marketing, sales, product development, and customer service departments in order to deliver both top-quality products and a high-level customer experience. The process begins with measurement. Johnson and Gustafsson walk readers through the steps necessary to determine a customer measurement strategy, observe and communicate with customers, create formal customer surveys, and process and interpret the survey data. Then they show readers how to use that data to build a cohesive plan for quality improvement and ongoing customer management. By helping mid-level managers assemble specific estimates of how increased quality and customer loyalty will impact the bottom line, their process allows upper-level managers to allocate the resources necessary to build a truly customer-oriented company. And by cementing the links between products, patrons, and profits, their book highlights the core competencies companies need to create both happy customers and the organizational know-how necessary to keep them happy.
