Fast Lane
Client contentment
How to measure and maintain customer satisfaction
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business Akron/Canton | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
Chuck Rotuno
president and CEO, OEConnection
Ensuring customer satisfaction is the key to any
company’s growth, says
Chuck Rotuno.
Since OEConnection’s inception in 2000, the president and
CEO has formulated procedures
to gauge and refine the client
satisfaction rate at the automotive technology company.
“The more data you collect,
the more you listen to your customers, the better off you will
be,” Rotuno says.
By using client feedback on a
daily basis, Rotuno continues to
grow OEConnection, which this
year expects to increase its staff
of 185 to more than 200 and
expand its customer list of
13,000 dealerships and 14 automobile makers.
Smart Business spoke with
Rotuno about how to ensure
customer satisfaction.
Q. How do you measure
customer satisfaction?
We do formal surveys annually with our customers on product satisfaction to make sure we
understand the overall satisfaction with products, their utilization, how often they’re being
used, our overall list of things
we can do better.
Try to listen to the customer.
Try to identify enhancements.
On a weekly basis in our customer care organization, we
perform surveys with our existing customers to make sure our
service organization is performing to a level that meets their
expectations.
One of the key questions is,
would they recommend our
services and solutions to somebody else? Another one is, are
they getting enough personalized assistance? At the end of the day, customers expect a
level of care and support that is
very important.
It’s understanding the quality
of your service on a regular
basis, how they feel about
your solution, would they recommend you to someone else.
Q. How often do you review
customer satisfaction and
feedback?
Continually is the only answer.
We like to believe our customer
satisfaction process is a
continuum in every way
we interface with a customer.
That can be in a lot of
different ways. Anytime
you touch a customer,
you have to start with, do
they like you, first, and
are they getting value out
of what you’re doing.
We have sales reps,
who call upon customers.
They’re in the field;
they’re on the phone.
They’re constantly
measuring satisfaction
and giving feedback.
When they’re generally
trying to pitch or sell
something else, they start
with, ‘Hey, I see you’re a subscriber with one application.
How is that going for you? Do
you like it? Let’s talk about what
else we can do for you.’
Our product marketing organization is constantly surveying
users for what’s next. What else
can we do?
It’s really a day-to-day process.
You can never have too much
feedback. If customers give you
a lot of feedback, you respond
to the feedback by continually
enhancing your product and
people continue to buy it, then I
think you have all of the elements of a successful initiative.
The worst thing you can do is
do a survey or ask somebody
what they think and then ignore
them. That doesn’t mean we
implement every suggestion you
get from customers. But we
clearly listen and understand,
and if the evidence supports
that there’s an opportunity to
improve, we act upon it.
My recommendation would
be to analyze the feedback and
determine what actions need
to be taken to address the
items in order of importance.
