Measuring satisfaction is a noble pursuit. But unless you have some idea of how your customers define satisfaction, you're not getting the whole picture. You may find out that 68 percent of your customers classify your sales force as excellent. But what are their criteria? And do their criteria match yours?

To find out, listen to the voice of the customer. There are myriad ways to weave this powerful and much-talked about force into your products and processes. One company; Gordon Bailey & Associates (GBA), a Duluth, Ga., marketing, communication and research firm, conducts in-depth telephone interviews with customers of its business-to-business clients as a part - albeit a critical one - of a multifaceted customer satisfaction program.

Benchmarking is an important early phase in the development of a CS process, but it won't give you the details on why ratings are high, low or how to improve, says Susan Thrower, a GBA senior research executive. That's where research and in-depth interviews in particular - can help.

GBA shoots for 30 completed interviews with customers in a range of groups. Depending on the client's needs, those groups can include key customers, average and sophisticated customers, and those whose business with the client firm has fallen off gradually. If you survey 30 customers with varied criteria, you should be able to get insights into what works best.

Freedom to talk

GBA takes a number of steps to aid respondent cooperation, including scheduling the interviews at the respondent's convenience and faxing questions in advance. As a result. some respondents have talked for up to two hours. Without payment.

The interviews have a set structure, but the main goal is to give the respondents freedom to talk in-depth about a host of service issues, thereby showing clients how the customer defines good service and where service gaps may exist. For example, in a section on critical needs, the respondent is asked to detail their critical needs and give instances of very good and very unacceptable service. "In some satisfaction surveys, customers give very general comments, such as, 'The equipment is not user-friendly.' But that doesn't take you far enough. You need to really probe and ask questions. Is the weakness related to training, manuals, or the operator interface? Is this an issue for regular operation or just maintenance? What is an outstanding example of user-friendly equipment? What should be changed? Does this weakness apply to all the equipment or just one model used?" Thrower says.

Further, it's key to define good and bad performance in ways that can be measured, such as the time it takes for a rep to arrive at the company to resolve a problem.

Upon hearing comments from the interviews, rather than engaging in some kind of customer service game of Twister, in which the company goes into all sorts of gyrations to please individual customers, a better approach is to determine if the issues are related to inconsistent delivery, corporate procedures, staff training, weak business processes, or individual communication skills, so you can put in place practices that have the best chance of pleasing the most people. For example, large customers of one company said during the indepth interview that they wanted more face-to-face contact with the company's sales staff, to discuss goals for the next year, etc. Perhaps every customer would appreciate that kind of meeting.

It's important, however, Thrower says, to separate behavior issues from process issues. In some cases, dissatisfaction is caused by a sales rep, whose interpersonal manner just doesn't agree with the customer. In others, it's the system the company uses, to handle service calls or send out invoices, for example. "You may hear comments about some aspect of service, say complaint management, being inconsistent. If they seem to be more behavior related, that's a training issue, and that's something you need to address internally," Thrower says.

Goodwill

A sometimes-overlooked benefit of talking to customers is the goodwill you earn by opening up the dialog in the first place. (For the interviews it conducts, GBA identifies the firm sponsoring the research.) If you have a solid relationship with your customer, they will see the mutual benefit in strengthening it and will be happy to tell you how to do that. You get to look great for asking them for their opinions, they get to tell you how they'd like things to be. That's a win-win if I've ever heard one.

But whether it's good or bad, you have to act on the information.

When your customers speak their mind, it can be hard to ignore. Thrower relates one example where GBA presented the client company with lengthy transcripts of the in-depth interviews. "They were mesmerized. They read them wordfor- word. Previously, the research reports just sat on the shelf. But here were their customers talking about what they cared about, saying that the company wasn't responsive enough."

That's the voice of the customer at work!