Hello. My name is John Kemp and this is my blog about a topic that I am passionate about (yes, passionate) – customer and employee satisfaction measurement.
That’s partly because I am Customer Service Director for Surveylab Ltd, an online survey company specialising in customer and employee surveys – but the views expressed here are my own and not necessarily representative of Surveylab.
I’ve been “serious” about customer satisfaction for as long as I can remember – and it’s often caused me problems in my business career. I can remember being criticised for spending too much time with customers or putting the customer before the company. As I moved up the management chain I also realised that highly motivated and engaged employees deliver far more than downtrodden under-informed and disillusioned people.
But despite having “seen the light” many years ago I’m still frustrated that too many managers are still more closely focused on customer acquisition than retention and people management still thrives on the use of the stick rather than the carrot!
I come from the belief that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain and grow an existing one just as a loyal and engaged employee is worth far more than an unmotivated, burnt-out and cynical ‘time server’. I also consider that minor tweaks to a corporate marketing budget can greatly improve customer retention and that employee engagement can often be improved by nothing more than an attitude change.
I also believe that you can only really identify the impact of poor customer and people satisfaction and track improvement by measuring performance on a regular basis. Unless management really know what their customers and employees think of them and their organisations how can they improve?
I also want to use this as a forum to share stories of good practice and discuss methods for measuring performance effectively.
I hope that readers will contribute their own ideas so that this can become a wider source of information for those of us interested in measuring and improving our own performance in these areas. I’m not planning an open discussion board but would welcome any ideas and stories. I won’t guarantee to publish them but if they are interesting and support the overall message behind this blog I will try to include them. Simply email your message to me.
