WHAT MAKES A CLIENT LOYAL: A COMPETENT TEST!

It is called the Z test - but its name's origin can only be explained in an informal conversation...

I do not know of a more effective way for making a group of people understand the basic principles of customer's satisfaction.

Ask people to fill in boxes 1 to 4 successively, answering the questions shown in the image below.

Click in the image to view amplified.

Do this exercise with colleagues or friends. You are sure confirm what we have discovered after repeating it with hundreds of people:

- the causes for loyalty are mainly customer service and quality of products and services;

- the causes for rejection are bad customer service and low quality of products and services;

- price is hardly mentioned in this exercise.

Conclusion: What makes a client loyal are quality and service, not price. Once disappointed they don't tell you, they just go away!

Written by Claus Jorge Süffert

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS: THE FEW VITAL ONES

As soon as we learned the importance of measuring results in the early nineties, we fell into a trap from which few were able to escape: we started to measure in excess.

Information technology, which allowed us to have increasingly detailed and up-to-date data, contributed a lot to this tendency.

In a hospital, in an IT area, in a restaurant chain and in many other organizations we'd find books with monthly updated figures, and we learnt to challenge people to present that which made a difference on a single A4 page.

The trick is to consistently measure that which is important and is (or may become) a problem.

In a factory, only single indicator: machine yield, caused an almost unbelievable revolution. In a dispatching area, the focus was on counting the number of cargo units alone that wouldn’t be dispatched within 48 hours. In a steel mill, it went for the number of batches that went back to oven during one month.

It is necessary to know the process and its local characteristics to find such precious measures.

At times we need to have a mirror-indicator to avoid an adverse side-effect a KPI could generate. Recently, concerning a technical service provider, they have been better controlled while measuring their schedule fulfillment when they arrive at a client's house (window), re-occurrence of calls (problem not solved) and, finally, productivity: number of weekly calls.

People are free to measure what they want, but if we focus on fewer vital indicators - well, there is no easier and more effective way of getting into a quality journey...

Written by Claus Jorge Süffert