Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Satmetrix Systems
Mountain View, CA

Satmetrix Customer
> Customer Satisfaction Assessment

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Global companies stake their futures on surpassing customer expectations. Satmetrix clients are seeking up-to- date customer satisfaction data that can be quickly shared throughout an organization. Two online service providers, a high-tech hardware company, and a leading software firm were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Benchmarking customer support down to the rep level

§ Prioritizing support training initiatives

§ Improving feedback to product engineering

WHY SATMETRIX?

Satmetrix combines a Web-based service, customer research expertise, and benchmarking data to help companies gauge the quality of their customers’ experience. Organizations incorporate Satmetrix Customer into their customer activities as an email follow-up to a Web or call center interaction. They work with Satmetrix to focus Web polling questions on the critical issues: company’s image, product features, quality of service, etc. As customers respond, the entire organization is able to have access to the appropriate level of feedback via its portal on Satmetrix’s Web site. Managers can break down the data according to their needs and establish escalation processes when feedback indicates subpar customer outcomes.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Real-time customer satisfaction is invaluable for companies with big investments in customer-support activities. Satmetrix allows companies to respond to emerging situations and motivate their contact groups by establishing meaningful feedback loops. In the past, Satmetrix customers could only assess customer satisfaction and the performance of outsourced customer support vendors on a periodic basis.

Enterprise innovation: Satmetrix clients use detailed feedback to align their entire organizations with customer-oriented goals. In particular, a number of reference customers are establishing customer benchmarks from the top down, and are sharing the data with Wall Street as well. Almost all of the companies have reported both substantial gains in overall customer satisfaction and specific instances in which immediate intervention impacted customer retention.

Technology gains: Traditional market research often imposes a significant lag time. Satmetrix allows companies to poll customers on a daily basis. Client organizations populate the Satmetrix service with data from their CRM systems to make sure that only the appropriate customers are contacted. In this way, customer satisfaction research is no longer a set of research documents but a strategic process.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Satmetrix clients recommend up-front consideration of how the information will be shared and used internally. The integration of CRM data with Satmetrix allows companies to track customer satisfaction down to the rep level. How the data will be interpreted and used in activities such as performance reviews is a critical organizational issue.

Learning: Customer support organizations emphasized the need for proper management training on the use of survey data and the design of escalation policies. In the best-case scenarios, companies used the data to better understand reasons for customer contact and shortened overall call times across the board.

Resources: Each time a company expands its use of Satmetrix to new areas of the business, the client team should make sure the education and expectation-setting processes occur.

Fit: Companies looking to improve their customer retention in both the offline and online worlds should consider the potential value of Satmetrix Customer.

COMPANY INFO

Satmetrix is a private company with 100 employees.

650.314.2300
www.satmetrix.com
Published: January 2002