Tag Archives: voice of the customer

Want to Elevate your Service Level? Listen to the Voice of the Customer.

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“The best advertising is done by satisfied customers,” as famously stated by American Marketing author, Philip Kotler. So, it should come as no surprise that meeting customer expectations and driving customer satisfaction continue to be the number one priority for businesses. But what’s most important to note is that customer satisfaction should always be a moving target – if you’re fortunate enough to have “achieved” it at one point in time, you’ll simply have to aim higher the following year.


Customer Service: Then vs. Now


Historically, the concept of customer service applied primarily to companies who provided their customers a service offering. Organizations that produced goods had different things on which to focus – from manufacturing to supply chains to distribution.

But that was then.

In recent years, however, there has been a paradigm shift. The focus on customer satisfaction seems to be equally as strong in both product-producing companies … Read more...

Documentation and Disaster: The Importance of Documented Procedures for Any Organization

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In October 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX flying with Lion Air from Jakarta crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board. In March 2019, another Boeing 737 MAX, this time with Ethiopian Airlines, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. Each plane had been delivered to the airlines only a few months earlier, making them the latest and most technology advanced aircraft in the world. At first glance, there should be no reason that these aircraft crashed under such similar circumstances.  

Graphic of a person flattened by a huge pile of paperwork

During the investigation, the root cause of these disasters began to become clear. In 2010, Boeing had begun a redesign of the 737 aircraft to remain competitive with Airbus, which had recently announced the introduction of the upgraded A320 to compete with the 737. To ensure timely delivery of the 737 MAX and avoid losing competitive advantage to Airbus, Boeing presented the 737 MAX as being … Read more...

Quality Management Tools for Enabling Customer Relationships

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In February 2002, the United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, uttered the following infamous phrase:

“There are known-knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known-unknows, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown-unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s clever rejoinder fills in the obvious missing element and demonstrates the secret wisdom of Rumsfeld’s analysis:

“…What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the ‘unknown knowns,’ the things that we don’t know that we know.”

When it comes to knowing what customers want, we could learn a lot from Rumsfeld and Žižek. Sometimes customers know what they want and how to articulate it; sometimes they know what they want but not how to articulate it. Even more difficult to understand is when customers don’t … Read more...