Establishing a Customer Focus:

Customer Satisfaction and Retention

Who is a Customer?

Supplier Supplier Supplier Supplier

The company and

its processes

Customer Customer Customer Customer

Supplier Supplier Supplier Supplier

Customer Customer Customer

& & &
Supplier Supplier Supplier

Customer Customer Customer

& & &
Supplier Supplier Supplier

Customer Customer Customer Customer

Scholtes six step strategy for
identifying Customer needs

What changes need to be made? Take any corrective action

that can do immediately, and lay out a plan for completing any
that is long term in nature Take Action as
Indicated
6
Do they agree with the conclusions? Adjust
your conclusion as needed based on the
external and internal feedback
Check the
Validity of your
5
conclusions Identifying the needs of internal
Do they match the speculated results ? How do they agree and
customers is a matter of ensuring
disagree? What problems did customers identify? What strong
that employees who depends on
point? Were there trends? How many customers complained of
the same problem? What changes in the product relating to it
were suggested ?
Analyze the
Results
4 one another as individual, as well
as departments that depend on
each other as units
Conduct a pilot study involving
just a few customer before real
gather information
Gather the
information
3 Communicate their needs to one
another continually

What types of information are Quality circle, self manage teams, cross
needed and who will be asked
to provide it Plan How to
gather the
2 departments team, and improvement
teams
information
Customers needs do not remain static. There is no such thing as a
Write down what permanent list of customers needs. We are be set by powerful force
you think customer
will say Speculate
about the
1 that keep coming over the horizon and are ever changing direction;
new technology, market competition, social upheavals, international
conflicts. These changing force create new customer need or change
Results
the priority given to existing ones (Josep M Juran)
Customer Focus
Customer focus is s to part of a process that leads to continual improvement in the organization which, in
turn, results in customer satisfaction
The process:
Determine who your customers are
Determine what attributes are most important to customers
Arrange these attributes in the order of importance indicated by your customers
Determine your customer level of satisfaction with each of these attributes
Tie result of customer feed back to your process
Develop a set measurements that tell how you are performing and which areas within