Shaping a Customer Satisfaction Culture

Producing lasting customer satisfaction requires vigilant alignment of an organization’s many moving parts.  Moreover, the only way to influence the kind of company-wide change that breeds these levels is to entrench the entire corporate culture in a relentless drive to satisfy customers.

Mindful leaders know setting customer satisfaction as a primary goal can be met with resistance.  The payoff, while potentially transformative, is rarely immediate.  Success requires the will to influence, coupled with an eye for the horizon. Once the commitment and processes are in place, however, prioritizing customer satisfaction elevates a company’s entire value proposition.

A leader must reinforce the commitment through every corporate decision and action: when they decide, for example, to empower front-line employees to make decisions to a customer’s benefit; when they pursue technologies or processes that make their products and services more effective for users, or; when they turn away from acquisitions and toward growth-through-performance.

Corporate moves can set the tone, but employees must also buy into the culture.  And leadership must send a consistent message to employees. This means internal communications, training and job descriptions that make the connection between employee effort and  the customer experience.

Can customer satisfaction initiatives really impact the products a company makes and the services it provides? Absolutely. And tracking progress toward company goals ensures accountability. Incentivizing a customer satisfaction mindset reinforces the message.

Delivering a fulfilling customer experience usually starts with listening.  Sales functions in particular have a unique opportunity to collect both formal and informal feedback from customers. Maintenance, quality-assurance and project-management personnel also have an ability to inform. Gathering and passing along that information should be a natural part of their job.

Leadership in the age of Big Data also needs quantifiable evidence that points laser-sharp to strengths and weaknesses in the end-user experience.  Year-to-year metrics can tell the story of progress or regression. And both internal data gathering and third-party studies can provide that intelligence.

Internal customer satisfaction surveys give insight into customer sentiment measured against expectations. Beyond that, independent studies, such as those from EnergyPoint and OFS Metrics, add invaluable benchmarking against competitors. They also add layers of objective detail that pinpoint problem areas.

Despite whatever hype surrounds a company or its offerings, customers ultimately form their own opinions. The challenge for oilfield suppliers comes when the data show a gap between goals and customer satisfaction ratings. In the end, addressing criticisms in good faith moves the entire organization toward improvement.

Companies show who they are to customers at every point of contact — from sales calls through the product life cycle.  And consistently meeting expectations along the way renders both more loyal and forgiving customers.

Steering any organization in a new direction takes conviction and commitment.  While no one can dictate customer satisfaction outcomes, leaders can control many of the factors that help produce them — products and services aligned with customer needs, promises delivered, open lines of internal and external communication, etc.

In this manner, leaders create more than an initiative — they create a sustainable culture of customer satisfaction to take hold.

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