Ah, but to where?  That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for the past few days, after having agreed to start up this blog.  Where am I trying to take it?  What am I doing here? 

As I sit in front of my trusty keyboard, I’m confronted by the reality that I’ve got about as much experience with the blogosphere as I do with training fish how to sing.  I don’t twitter or facebook or youtube.  Myspace refers to the work area in my garage.  I’ve figured out roughly ten percent of what my cell phone can do, and in my world, social networking is based more on speaking than typing, aided and abetted by something on the rocks, as opposed to using anything remotely electronic.  I’ve never had much appetite for reading the cathartic musings of the emotionally stunted, or the rants and raves of the intellectually lame.  If anything, I’ve generally viewed bloggers as self-indulgent eccentrics with WAY too much free time on their hands. 

I write, therefore I am. 

Yet here I am, getting ready to post my first blog.  Truthfully, I remain somewhat uncertain as to whether this is a good idea or not.  Oh sure, I’ve been offered encouragement on numerous (well, a few, anyway) occasions and by numerous people (the, uh, exact number escapes me) to use this as a resource for some of the millions of business owners and operators out there.  After all, the economy is on life-support, and many of those owners and operators are asking variations of the same basic question – if I can’t prosper, what can I at least do to survive?           

Do I have something to offer to that discussion?  Well, I sell and conduct business-to-business customer satisfaction surveys for a living.   I’ve been collecting customer satisfaction data for years.  I’ve read the comments and analyzed the responses from tens of thousands of both delighted and utterly frustrated customers. 

I’ve worked with hundreds of client companies, scattered across five continents.  Along the way I’ve witnessed first hand the economic value of establishing customer satisfaction and loyalty as corporate imperatives.  Alas, I’ve also seen the effects of customers summarily taking their business somewhere else.  Most of the latter group never saw it coming.  Some of the former weren’t entirely sure how they did it.  Surely there are lessons to be shared in both circumstances.  

Don’t get me wrong; we’re not talking red capes here, actual or implied.  I’m not making promises of handing anyone the Midas touch.  The streets in my world are not paved in gold, and they won’t be in yours either.    

Still, the cold reality is that while keeping your customers satisfied is vital at any time, in this economy, losing any business is simply not an option.  The $64,000 question is, how do you keep that from happening? 

For the vast majority of companies, some kind of third party survey is typically employed to take the pulse of customer sentiments, to find out what’s going well, and to find out what’s not working.  As one searches the web, there are thousands of sites offering solutions.  An awful lot of them are peddling products that simply don’t work.  Others are tacitly trying to create an entry point for the ultimate aim of selling something else.  Software.  Consulting.  Books.  Other kinds of surveys.     

In a world of hidden agendas and ulterior motives - some of it almost brilliantly diabolical – trying to figure out what’s real and what’s illusion can be confusing as hell.  I’m in the business, and I’ve read tomes of marketing bluster that left me shaking my head in disbelief and dismay.  Customer satisfaction isn’t rocket science, but some of the things I’ve run into out there are so cloaked in esoteric obfuscation that most rocket scientists would be unable to wrap their heads around it all.       

So, I’ve decided to try to use this little slice of cyberspace to sift through the esoteric clutter.  To give myself and others a vehicle for discussion on how to measure customer satisfaction, what to do with the information once you get it, and why it’s vital to any continuous improvement program.  Not that I’ve reconciled the notion that I’m going to do this thing, I can see a quickly expanding lineup of things to discuss.  Hopefully that lineup will grow as others begin to add to and build on the discussion points.  Time will tell.     

That’s the starting point.  We’ll see how it goes from there.             

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under 1. Introduction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.