As an ISO9001 supplier of innovative, exciting instruments for the water industry, Process Instruments (UK) Ltd measures the satisfaction of its customers so that we can ensure customer satisfaction targets are met regularly. After some recent analysis of the data from our telephone survey, we found some very unexpected results.
Customer satisfaction results from the water industry clearly show that customers are more satisfied if they have had a fault or problem and it has subsequently been resolved, than if they had no fault at all.
I believe that this is a consequence of our experience as general consumers.
People are very used to purchasing complex electronic based items such as MP3 players and mobile phones, and our expectations are that these devices will work straight out of the box. Most of us, however, have had experience of occasions when our nice new device didn’t work or it failed shortly after we got it. In this situation our expectations of customer service are quite low. We’ve all experienced being told that our call is important, and then being left on hold for twenty minutes. This conditioning means that our customers are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied when we ship an instrument that works, we are merely meeting their expectations. In order to exceed our customers’ expectations we need to quickly and efficiently resolve problems with our instrumentation as and when they arise.
As it should be every company’s goal to have high customer satisfaction levels, and as
surprisingly those customers who have had problems resolved are happier with us as an organisation, than those who had no problem at all, we have to ask ourselves whether we should design easily resolvable faults into our instruments as standard. That way we can resolve the problem quickly and exceed our customers’ expectations thereby increasing customer satisfaction levels.
It would be silly to pretend that Process Instruments never have problems. No business can claim that. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t need customer service departments. What is required is a method of speedily identifying a problem and resolving it to the satisfaction of our customers.
To ensure that this happens every customer complaint needs to be reviewed by a person with authority within the company. Our published customer satisfaction and service results clearly show that Process Instruments already have this in place, and that customer satisfaction levels are extremely high.
So even though logic might dictate that we should design faults into our analysers you will be pleased to know that Process Instruments has not started to, nor is there any plan to, introduce faults into our instrumentation!
If you would like to read more about Process Instruments and their innovative instrumentation (that very rarely has a fault), please visit www.processinstruments.net.
Or contact: Mike Riding or Jo Lee-Reynolds
Process Instruments (UK) Ltd
Process House
Dominion Court
Billington Road
Burnley
Lancashire
BB11 5UB
Tel: 01282 422 835
Email: mike.riding@processinstruments.net or jo.lee@processinstruments.net