Winning new customers is just the beginning. Keeping those customers - and satisfying them to the point of recommending you to others - is equally important, and the mark of a true customer relationship. Reaching the goal of customer satisfaction and loyalty means understanding how your consumers perceive your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and knowing which of these are the true drivers of their satisfaction.
Rockbridge specializes in customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement. We help organizations with the following:
- Monitor customer satisfaction and loyalty over time. We conduct customer satisfaction tracking studies online, by telephone, and in multiple languages. We use our Path to Excellence model for many engagements, and we employ a gaps-based measurement approach rooted in SERVQUAL, developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry.
- Identify aspects of the customer relationship that are most important to customers in keeping them satisfied and loyal. We conduct key driver analysis using advanced multivariate tools.
- Link customer satisfaction and loyalty to the bottom line to help management plan improvement initiatives and assess their success. This analysis can be based on information reported by customers (such as share of wallet) and what is captured in the CRM database.
- Measure the cost impact, underlying causes, and best strategies for reducing customer attrition or churn. We deploy innovative tools for assisting in this process, including segmentation of lost customers (e.g., mercenaries, disaffected, Benedict Arnolds, etc.)
Rockbridge has conducted customer satisfaction and loyalty initiatives in scores of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, online services, consumer credit, travel, power utilities, advertising, associations, government, and media. We maintain a number of customer satisfaction tracking studies for mid-size and Fortune 500 services firms.
Rockbridge also provides its clients a technology advantage in measuring customer satisfaction. Not only do we conduct many satisfaction surveys over the Internet, but we have also developed systems for disseminating performance metrics online, increasing the speed of customer feedback and saving time and money on distribution. Rockbridge keeps its clients at the forefront of customer satisfaction measurement, while offering solid approaches with proven value.
The Path to Excellence
Rockbridge advocates a five phase process, The Path to Excellence, to using measurement to drive success in satisfying customer needs and affecting purchase behavior. In most projects, we undertake all of the following five phases:
- Problem Definition involves gathering input on the service environment from stakeholders (management and employees). This stage does more than capture valuable information; it also ensures the results will ultimately meet customer needs and have internal buy-in.
- Discovery, or Exploratory Research, consists of allowing customers to identify, in an open-ended manner, the issues and expectations they believe are important in driving their satisfaction.
- Baseline Measurement consists of gathering an initial measure of customer perceptions and expectations using an exhaustive list of questions.
- Planning consists of using the baseline results for goal setting and decision-making. In this stage, we can also administer the survey to employees and management and compare them with customer opinions to identify perception gaps.
- Tracking consists of continuously measuring customer satisfaction to identify progress towards meeting goals.
Read whitepapers on Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty.