Cleaning up the customer satisfaction waste dump
- Southern Company Services, Inc., Atlanta, GA (United States)
- Applied Marketing Science, Inc., Waltham, MA (United States)
Most electric utilities have been measuring Customer Satisfaction for several years now with the explicit goal of inducing their employees to improve their handling of customers. While many companies experienced early improvements, the scores have now leveled off. Increasingly, utilities are finding that their Customer Satisfaction Measurement system has reverted to little more than a {open_quotes}report card,{close_quotes} with no clear connection to business practice or processes. Even more alarming is the fact that many companies are now questioning the value of this complicated and expensive effort. This phenomenon is not unique to the electric utility industry -- it is happening in almost every industry in America. What companies really need is a way to tie customer satisfaction to business practices. To accomplish this, the Southern Company, along with several other utilities, are using the Voice of the Customer Process, which came out of the Japanese auto industry. It combines Customer Satisfaction Measurement with Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in order to guide the company into linking specific customer wants and needs to explicit performance measures and business process improvement efforts.
- Research Organization:
- Electric Power Research Inst. (EPRI), Palo Alto, CA (United States); Synergic Resources Corp., Bala-Cynwyd, PA (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 102705
- Report Number(s):
- EPRI-TR-104558; TRN: 95:001847-0015
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: Nov 1994; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings: Sixth Biennial Marketing Research Symposium: Blue sky to bottom line{hor_ellipsis}marketing research, customer value and utility performance; PB: 481 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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