Strategic Discipline Blog

There are a number of components within the inner working of Meetings, Metrics and Priorities to make Strategic Discipline work for your business.  When we begin working with clients at Positioning Systems, any implementation of Strategic Discipline includes customer and employee reporting in the weekly and monthly meeting segments. This is critical due to the importance of pattern recognition and the need for balance in your business metrics and priorities.

What’s your measurement of customer satisfaction?  Do you have any method to measure customer satisfaction right now?

If you don’t, whatever you feel your customer satisfaction rating is, it’s probably wrong.   At the time Fred Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question was written in 2006 the average NPS score was less than ten percent. That means that the average business has just 10% more promoters than detractors. 

Bain & Company surveyed 362 company senior executives and discovered 96% felt they had customer focus.  Eighty percent believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers.  When Bain & Company surveyed their customers only 8% gave these companies a superior rating. 

80 to 8.  That’s a huge gap between what most companies believe and the stark reality of what customers feel. 

What makes you feel you’re doing better?  If it’s feel you’re relying on, doesn’t this revealing statistic make you want to measure your customer satisfaction level more reliably?

As Gazelles coaches we recommend The Ultimate Questions Net Promoter Score.  It’s reliable, effective, and simple.   When done correctly it should not only reflect your local market it should be a good leading indicator for profitability.  One of my client’s is able to measure customer satisfaction down to the granular level of which specific employees influence customers scores.

Yet customer satisfaction shouldn’t be just about measuring.  It should be speaking to your customers directly.  Your executive team needs to be proactive contacting customers. They should ask directly to discover how they are doing, what’s going on in their world, if competitors are asking for their business, or doing things better than you are, and finally how you are doing for them.

If you’re not touching your customers every week, if you’re not asking them specifically how you are doing and what you should be doing more of, how can you possibly stay ahead of your competition and keep your customers coming back?

If you’d like a copy of the four questions we recommend our clients executive team members should use to contact at least one customer a week, send me an email [dwick@positioningsystems.com] with 4 customer questions in the title and I’ll send it to you.

Last time I promised to discuss bad profits.  This blog really details what bad profits are and why you should be critical of any practice in your business that doesn’t follow the golden rule. It also provides examples of Net Promoter Score stars. 

I want to entice you to begin gathering customer information.  To do that let’s look at some examples of companies that have used customer feedback to build their business. That's next blog.