Customer satisfaction and Quality Assurance go hand-in-hand when your trying to maintain or grow any business. If you provide a quality product or service that your customers are satisfied with, then most likely you’ll get repeat business and positive press.
A few years back we had a customer that would place orders every month….each time we received no complaints. Actually we never heard anything from the customer and just interpreted it as no news meant good news and went along our merry way.
Then one day, I was informed that this customer was at a recent trade show soliciting business producing the same product that we did….at some point our customer had become our competitor and we didn’t even notice it. How could that be?
I then spoke to the sales department and informed them of the situation. We looked at the sales history for this customer and realized that the sales orders had been decreasing for some time. First it was smaller orders each month, then monthly orders became quarterly orders, then eventually they had stopped purchasing from us altogether….our customer had vanished and we didn’t even notice!
After contacting the former customer, I was told that they had been dissatisfied for quite some time and felt they could purchase the equipment and manufacture a higher quality product and offset their costs by selling their downtime. When I asked why they had never complained, they responded with ‘you never asked’.
There’s a lesson here that we can all learn from….never assume that your customers are happy just because they haven’t officially complained! When was the last time you asked your customer for feedback as to how happy they are with your products or service?
Although this example deals with an external customer, we should also take the time to find out how satisfied our internal customers are with our performance. So many times we forget how much more difficult and frustrating we may unknowingly make other people’s jobs that work upstream from us.
Take care,
Sandra
