The following are excerpts from my recent interview with Kristina Evey, http://www.CentricStrategies.com, on customer satisfaction, service and
retention.

KE: What is the best way to measure customer satisfaction? Do surveys still matter in a Twitter/Facebook/social media world?

PVH: I won’t discount totally the worth of customer surveys to measure service satisfaction levels.  Surveys might not only be valuable, but completely necessary for some businesses that have limited or even non-existent personal contact with customers.

But for most companies, the best and most reliable method for determining customer satisfaction is the desire and ability to talk to the customer directly, both at the time of the transaction and again later, after the initial exuberance of the transaction experience has subsided.

As for the current social media movement, personally, I am not ready to concede that social media has significantly changed the way we measure customer satisfaction. It has impacted the way satisfaction is reported in small groups.

KE: What is the #1 reason you feel excellent customer service is not delivered?

PVH: There are a number of symptoms that may give indication of service delivery problems, but most can be traced back to a sense of either organizational or individual complacency. We become too comfortable, too satisfied or too oblivious to the fact that even good products and services without continuous effort to improve can change for the worse.

KE: What is the first thing that could be done to turn that around?

Force employees at all levels to come face-to-face with the customer. Meet them. Talk with them. Listen to them as they describe in detail what they like, and more importantly, don’t like about your products and/or services. This can (and should) be done with any level of employee. During my years in manufacturing, our sales force would routinely take key operations employees (fabricators, assemblers, inspectors, etc.) with them to visit customers. The impact of those visits was felt directly in the information that was fed back to their operations colleagues and in their future attention to detail in their own workmanship. This firsthand contact with customers provided a better understanding of the why not just the how of their jobs.