Although the ASQ Certified Quality Manager Handbook, and standards such as ISO 9000: 2000, MBNQA, as well as "gurus" such as Deming, Crosby, and Juran call for customer focus and customer satisfaction measurement, quality managers are uncomfortable with "imprecise" and "subjective" customer satisfaction data. For this session, customer satisfaction is defined as the extent to which customers' perceptions of product and service quality meet and exceed customer expectations. This session's customer satisfaction challenges may increase quality managers' discomfort with customer satisfaction data. However, this discomfort can be alleviated by following the suggested roadmap.

Challenge One: What do they want?!! Do managers know and understand customer expectations? Meeting customer expectations is the challenge for managers. Quality managers have to help senior managers examine their own beliefs as well as what customers say. Many senior managers often may hear only what they want to hear.

What is the spec? What are the requirements? Conformance to customer requirements is a "going out of business" business model. Although reducing defects and returns, meeting tightened specs, increasing throughput, and reducing inventory are all good things to do, the customer may and does look for more. The barriers to senior management knowing what customers want will be detailed.

Challenge Two: We can't give away the store!! Product and service quality goals are decided by managers, but the quality goals are not what the customer wants. Many organizations commit the mistake of hoping for "A" while doing "B". The problem, helping management understand customer expectations so that data-based decisions about resource deployment can be made, will be examined. Similarly, the most common data sources that will persuade managers to talk the talk will be outlined.

Challenge Three: Walking the talk. This is the most difficult challenge to address. As Deming has observed, management controls the resources for change. How employees can and do behave is the result of how managers hire, train, supervise, support, empower and reward employees.

Challenge Four: Discontinue throwing problems over the wall; instead, break down the walls. As Deming noted in his Ninth Point, success depends upon breaking down barriers between departments. Customers often experience their greatest frustrations when employees of one department do not behave as communications from another department had led the customers to expect. Customers often report that promises have not been met. Customer complaints should be a source for preventative actions rather than a leading indicator of customers and revenue lost.

After the four challenges are described, a number of real-world cases will be briefly examined to illustrate some possible ways to meet those challenges. These cases will exemplify much of the roadmap to meet the four challenges.

Finally, a roadmap will be offered with many of the concomitant issues from each challenge delineated, sources of data suggested, possible quality tools for causal analysis provided, as well as print and web resources for further action listed.

Brief Outline of Presentation:

1. Introduction
2. Four Challenges
   1. What do they want
   2. We can't give away the store
   3. Walking the talk
   4. Break down the walls
3. Four challenges applied to real world problems
   1. LL Bean
   2. Client had a system that made it difficult to give the company money
   3. Client only wanted to measure products and services offered not what customers expected
   4. Client wanted reduced operational costs, but sales and marketing opposed the cost savings
   5. Nordstrom
   6. Maui Jim
   7. Ritz Hotels
   8. Case where the "right" question determined a quality outcome for a corporate console
   9. Boston Coach
   10. Client wanted customer data to align with major customers
   11. Others
4. Road map to meet the Four Challenges will include
   1. Customer data
   2. Internal survey data
      1. Training needs analysis
      2. Employee perceptions of customer satisfaction
   3. Dialogue with customers
   4. Improved horizontal and vertical communication
   5. Influencing IT to support customer quality initiatives
   6. Empowerment is still a good idea

Bio

Roger Berg, Ph. D. - From 1972-1987, I was a Professor at the University of Nebraska. For half my tenure, I directed an organizational improvement program for the US DOE. From 1987 to 1996, I managed training and organizational improvement for the MITRE Corporation. When MITRE's government customers began to implement quality, I helped internal units develop parallel quality processes. In 1995, I was part of the first group to receive QMgr certification. In April, May and June of 1996, I taught a Customer Satisfaction Course for ASQ Boston Section at Bard. My later positions as Worldwide Quality Research Manager and Customer Satisfaction Manager in Lotus (an IBM Company) Development's Quality Management and Customer Loyalty Group and my role as a Senior Marketing Research Analyst have also been used to develop this session. Now, at Northeast Quality Research, we help clients develop a cost-effective customer satisfaction measurement capability that builds customer loyalty & improves business processes.