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As the world of technology becomes more and more sophisticated, businesses find themselves with an overabundance of customer service management software. While this software continues to invade the marketplace, some companies use it to effectively cut themselves off from their customers. As budgets get leaner and companies get meaner, the responsibility for customer care falls to technology. We ask customers to jump through voice-activated hoops or press buttons through phone-activated menus while their frustration grows. Companies juggle too many balls with fewer employees and rely on technology alone to monitor customer satisfaction.
This lack of human contact is a major reason for customer dissatisfaction. Companies find themselves competing to regain customers they should have taken care of in the first place. Even if the product is flawed, a good front-line employee can assuage the issue with good customer service that retains a customer's loyalty. As the human element gets lost in the shuffle, the customer is often the ball that is dropped. Technology should be used to enhance, rather than replace, the human element of customer management.
This paper proposes a way that technology can be combined with quality management techniques to re-bridge the customer service gap. Specifically, innovative online marketing research methods are demonstrated within the context of the Six Sigma approach to quality improvement. The goal is to systematically generate actionable information that will enhance the ability to swiftly attend to customer satisfaction issues by making managers responsible for bringing human contact back into the realm of customer relationship management (CRM).
Market research has always been a powerful tool enabling companies to gauge customers' needs, wants, desires, and satisfaction. However, with regard to customer satisfaction, if the data are not usable, reliable, relevant, and timely, a company wastes its energy and resources. Furthermore, a business must react immediately to the information or the whole venture is an exercise in futility. Therefore, this paper focuses on using timely, actionable research as a management tool for customer loyalty and retention. By combining a market research collection method (online surveys) with a management philosophy (Six Sigma), a company can maximize its profits and radically improve ROI by returning to square one - the customer.
The ability of employees to access centralized customer service data from anywhere...