How do you know if you are a pain or pleasure to your customers? Obviously the best method to evaluate if an organization is meeting its customers’ expectations is through engagement, dialogue, and measurement. In doing so, the organization engages with the customer to understand how they perceive performance (mostly subjective), then establishes methods of control, measures performance, and takes appropriate action as the feedback dictates. This is a much easier task if an organization is delivering products and/or services to a small number of customers. But how can organizations establish accurate effective measures if they have a larger customer base? Traditionally, organizations will measure the obvious criteria such as delivery schedule, internal cost, and quality. On the surface, those would appear to be easy attributes to measure. So, let’s say the customer complains about the number of escapes (defective products or services) it receives from the organization. Subsequently, the organization commits to an X-percentage in escapes reductions. Again, easy stuff,… right? The organization needs only to perform a Pareto analysis to find the highest quantity of escapes and then eliminate such to hit the reduction target. We frequently do the same thing when we attempt to achieve those targets for six-sigma projects. Bring the quantity of the targeted attribute down or up and your performance numbers improve. But, what about the perception of the customer? Just because the organization reduces the numbers of escapes, it does not mean they are doing anything to improve perception. The customer may not be feeling any improvement in performance. So, when selecting the performance measures that will make a big time difference, the organization needs to consider the index (measure) of pain related to escapes and near misses. For example, the pain associated with the absence of documentation for a part delivery is going to be much lower than the pain associated with a product escape that causes an in-flight shutdown of an aircraft engine. By analyzing the impact of escapes and potential impact of near misses, the organization can establish meaningful measurements which more closely align to actual safety risks and economic impact. - When developing a pain measurement process, the attributes for measurement need to be real. - Don’t allow the politics of performance measurement become an undue influence. Ideally, engage key customers in the assignment of weights to individual measurements and to encourage buy-in. - And, be consistent. Ensure that those who are calculating the measurements are calibrated so that measurement variability is controlled. By understanding the level of pain you are giving your customers, and the associated causes, organizations are not just playing the numbers game. But rather, organizations are empowered to apply their scarce resources to the issues that have the greatest influence on customer satisfaction.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 17:57:32 +0000
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