When we talk about a business, we owe most of our success to our customers, so it is important to retain those who are already yours and win over your competitors. This task is impossible if you don't know how to listen to them, however, collecting data is not the same as having information, and information alone tells you nothing if you don't analyze it to gain perspectives and knowledge. Only when you reach this point can you make good decisions, implement logical and rationalized solutions to problems and integrate control systems, which guarantee that your company will maintain the new level of quality achieved. In addition, these systems allow you to assure your customers that you will continue to listen to them, thus continually improving their experience.
For the whole customer experience transformation process there are several tools that can help you from data collection to analysis, but there is already a methodology based on continuous process improvement, which can guide you, step by step, to achieve your goals. In this blog I will explain how you can adapt each stage of DMAIC to a service to improve customer satisfaction.
This article will help you become familiar with the Six Sigma continuous improvement philosophy and its flagship methodology DMAIC: Improve your Customer Journey Map with Six Sigma.
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In previous blogs we have talked about this methodology, it is a tool focused on improving processes, not their outputs. In this way you do not focus your efforts, for example, on the screws you produce, but rather on identifying in which part of the manufacturing process there is a problem that requires a solution, consequently you will obtain better screws and make fewer errors.
The same happens with the degree of satisfaction of your customers, the goal can be to increase it, but the way to do this is by optimizing the processes where your customers are directly involved with your business, so they can live a better experience. In this sense, you must focus on the processes of marketing, sales, customer service and attention, warranties, etc. But remember that every project has a scope, you can't fix everything simultaneously, so DMAIC is a perfect tool to start with a transformation of your service processes to improve the experience and therefore the satisfaction of your customers.
Imagining that the main objective is to improve your customers' satisfaction through a better experience, it is important, for this stage, to define well the scope of the project. There are several processes in which you come into direct contact with your customer, and in each one there are activities that can mark a unique moment that will represent their feeling towards the company.
Depending on the resources you can allocate in terms of time, personnel, and money, you can delimit the project. However, when identifying the most important activities, as well as the qualitative and quantitative indicators that will help you visualize your current situation, you must take into consideration the perspective of the people receiving the service. This can be achieved through diagramming. In this case, I recommend creating a Customer Journey Map of your Buyer Persona, since it is a visual representation of the decision process that someone who wants to buy a product or service from your company must go through.
Why? Simply because building this tool means integrating your service team to define the characteristics and behavior of your customers, since they are the ones who know them best and can provide valuable information regarding their problems, needs and expectations. You can also use a SIPOC to complement the Customer Journey Map, it will help you identify suppliers, inputs, outputs, and customers of your process to better define the indicators.
I recommend this blog to learn how to diagram your Buyer Persona's decision process: Customer Journey Map: What is it and how to create one?
Now you need to collect data to measure the indicators you defined. This stage is key, however, despite being able to deduce the needs and expectations of your customers from a Customer Journey Map, the truth is that your criteria will probably be biased because you are on the other side of the fence. It is difficult to put yourself in your customers' shoes when they are totally different from you, are looking for your products or services for different reasons and probably have different expectations according to their needs. So, on the one hand, there is what you perceive and on the other the reality, which will not necessarily coincide.
We cannot play only with what you perceive, so the best way to be able to work in your business is with real data, these should be collected through tools such as voice of the customer, forms, satisfaction surveys, focus groups, customer incognito or SERVQUAL.
Remember that you are not measuring the final output of your customer's buying process, you have several moments of truth that are critical points where you can influence and leave a good experience on them. You must collect as much information as you can throughout the Customer Journey, but mainly from these moments of truth. In addition, you must consider what you are going to measure.
Remember that the cause is not the same as the effect, taking pills to mitigate flu symptoms will not make you stop being sick. Just measuring the degree of customer satisfaction, without asking why they are not completely satisfied or what suggestions they would give us to improve their experience, would be a serious mistake since it would not allow us to identify the root causes or the critical parameters for their satisfaction.
This blog gives you some tips on how to create your Customer Journey Map: Customer Journey and Customer Journey Maps in 900 characters
Once we have collected information from customers regarding their perception of our service, and just as if we were applying DMAIC in manufacturing activities, at this stage we must use the necessary tools to identify the root causes of the problems in our processes.
In manufacturing it is easy to go directly to the employees, ask them why they perform their tasks the way they do, you can observe the machines working and ask yourself if it is the best possible way. At the end of the day, the more questions you ask, the better. The same goes for services, except that you can't measure the performance of your activities or employees without the voice of your customers. Therefore, it would not be a bad idea to evaluate how customer-centric your processes and staff are by means of a Gap Analysis that tells you how much difference there is between current and optimal performance. You can do this based on some parameters such as your organization's ability to identify consumer behaviors and trends or the communication skills of your staff to have good relationships with customers.
Ideally, you would like to be able to quantify all of this, so it would be easier to see where there are problems and how important they are. However, there are qualitative variables, and we must find some way to quantify or prioritize them. In the next step I will give you an example of this step.
At this stage we will design a proposed solution to the problems, then we will validate it to ensure that we are not attacking the effects but directly the root causes. Always remember to perform a risk analysis associated with the implementation of a solution. This will give you prevention, correction, or contingency plans in case something does not go as planned. Also, if you identify several root causes in more than one process, you will probably have to prioritize some of the most important parameters to achieve customer satisfaction, without neglecting the others.
To show the potential of the Analyze and Improve stages: you can start by identifying the critical parameters for customer satisfaction (CTSat), as defined in Measure; then you determine which are the critical service parameters according to your knowledge of the business (CTSer). You can give them evaluations and compare them in a matrix to define which service parameters have the greatest effect on customer satisfaction. You take this result and compare it against the critical process parameters (CTPro), finally, you will obtain the list of the process activities necessary to provide the service and that have the greatest effect on customer satisfaction. From here you can design the solutions and then validate them through pilot testing or design of experiments. It should be noted that I have extracted this methodology from a scientific article of a Six Sigma project in a plastic packaging industry, but I am conditioning it to a service so you can see that you can look for success stories and adapt them to your context.
As an example, in a hypothetical case you might find that, of the Marketing and Sales processes (CTPro), sending a summary of technical information about the products, having videos of their uses, and offering different payment methods (CTSer) have a greater effect on customer satisfaction (CTSat) than sending the entire catalog, writing blogs, or sending the digital invoice. This does not mean that if you offer customer care, consulting, or after-sales services, with all their respective activities, they are not important or do not have opportunities for improvement, rather it means that in a first iteration of DMAIC we find a way to prioritize and delimit the problems to plan the first round of solutions.
Once we get to this point, we simply must devise a control system to ensure that those small defects, which we had in delivering the services, have been fixed and will not happen again. The key at this stage is to ask for feedback, both from your staff, to see if there are problems in the implementation of the solution; and from your customers, to determine if there have really been improvements in terms of their requirements, expectations, and satisfaction.
In the extreme case of having applied a redesign of some service process, you will then need a system to control that it is being carried out in the updated way and with the best possible practices. For example, you could consider periodic training of staff, so that both novices and experienced staff are constantly being trained and you have a record of it. You can also plan internal audits once or twice a year to monitor the process.
Remember that this methodology arises from a philosophy of continuous improvement. Once you close the Control stage, you can start again with Define and in this way, you will be continuously optimizing your processes. In addition, the Buyer Persona and, therefore, the Customer Journey Map, must be constantly updated since there are trends, seasonalities and cyclicalities that affect consumer habits, so you will never have a process that is one hundred percent optimized, but at least you will ensure that you are not outdated and that you have a competitive advantage in the market, since not many companies decide to adopt a philosophy like this.