All Posts Tagged With: "customer dissatisfaction"
Creating a Positive Customer Experience
Few companies face the levels of customer dissatisfaction that Comcast confronts every day. Web sites have been created solely to document the horror stories of aggrieved customers. In June, Comcast ranked second in MSN Money’s Customer Service Hall of Shame, and it ranks second to last among cable and satellite TV companies on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
After years of poor performance and faced with growing competition, Comcast decided to take customer satisfaction seriously. It started by monitoring blogs and Twitter to find and assist unhappy customers. Next, as a StarTribune article documents, it developed a new Customer Care program that features:
- Giving Comcast technicians handheld devices that can test a home’s entire network
- Expanding technicians’ hours to include working on Sundays
- Giving employees “Make It Right” cards to a hand out to anyone with a complaint; the cards have a phone number to call for priority assistance
- Training technicians and call-center agents to listen and be respectful and to help solve problems the first time
- Promoting a new customer guarantee that promises to handle problems quickly, respect the customer’s time, and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on all services
Listening to the Voice of the Customer is the first step to improving satisfaction and building loyalty. The first Area to Address in Item 3.2 of the Baldrige Criteria focuses solely on customer listening, while Item 3.1 asks how you determine and deploy customer support requirements and how you exceed customer expectations…
26Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedColleges as Dissatisfied Stakeholders
Colleges have a stake in the quality of education delivered by K-12 school districts. The Baldrige Criteria ask (3.2a1) how school districts listen to, among others, colleges “to obtain actionable information and to obtain feedback on your educational programs…”
Well, listen to this: Less than one-fourth of the class of 2009 who took the ACT test met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. Two-thirds met the benchmarks in English, slightly more than half in reading, 42% in math, and just 28% in science. And these are supposedly our smartest students.
In an online article on Education Week, Jon L. Erickson, the nonprofit ACT Inc.’s VP for educational services, listed the factors that contributed to the scores:
- Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills and the key standards to be mastered
- High school students are not taking the right courses
- The courses are not rigorous enough to deliver college-level skill and knowledge
Of course, colleges are not a school district’s only stakeholders. A school district must balance the need to better prepare students for college with the needs of other stakeholders including students, parents, businesses, communities, and the government, and those needs don’t align as often you would think.
But they surely align on this: Schools exist to educate students and this is a pretty reliable indicator that they must improve. And in that regard, colleges are not their only dissatisfied stakeholders.
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19Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
