ISO 10004 has some fine ideas to get your customer satisfaction activities organized. As we’re bombarded more and more with surveys, suffering from survey fatigue to the point where we’re saying ‘Why bother?’ we still need to get some information to continue our improvement journey.
The conceptual framework looks like this:
It’s the Input -> Process -> Output model and reminds us that sometimes we’re so focused on ‘our’ side (meeting the product/service spec) that we forget that the customer has expectations not included in the contract.
We are constantly trying to get ourselves into the top right hand corner, beyond just ‘meeting’ needs and expectations:
Getting to know what our customer cares about (not what we think they care about) will keep us ahead of the competition if we provide it!