Focus on Customer Satisfaction Part 1: When Quality is Free for Custom Cabinetry
Every company in business today is involved in supplying services and/or products to people and organizations called “customers.” It is critical for their managers, particularly for those who intend to satisfy the custom cabinetry consumer, to regularly step back and reflect on the fact that the success or failure of their enterprise rests almost exclusively in their hands. Understanding what drives customers to choose a product or service, and why they choose to continue or discontinue their use is vital to a company’s ability to maintain profitability in the long run.
Studies show that customers are usually lost for three primary reasons: bad service, bad products, and competition. The bottom line is that if you don't give your customers some good reasons to stay, your competitors will give them a reason to leave.
Intuit founder Scott Cook once said “if you can’t please your current customers, you don’t deserve any new ones.”
According to Jack Welch, to truly become a customer-centered business, companies will need to be less complex and more agile, so they can respond to or even anticipate customers more quickly. In his unique manner of eloquence, “If you’re not simple, you can’t be fast. And, if you’re not fast, you’re dead.” So, “the million dollar question” is: how can we consistently ensure all modes of customer access contribute value to customers, achieve organizational success and sustainability?
Fine custom kitchen cabinets begins its day with inherent complexity; so first, don’t confuse things by taking on cumbersome and/or intricate systems to manage quality. Again, the key is simplicity and consistency. W. Edwards Deming in the 1950's recommended that to exceed customer requirements, business processes should be placed in a continuous feedback loop so that managers can identify and change the parts of the process that need improvements. Deming created a (rather oversimplified) diagram to illustrate this continuous process, commonly known as the PDCA cycle for Plan, Do, Check, and Act: For this post, we’ll cover the first step in the loop, Plan.
Planning for customer satisfaction takes into account all plans and service features related to meeting expectations. Setting and managing expectations is a critical factor in customer satisfaction and it is a good practice to underpromise and overdeliver. In his book ‘Leadership’, Rudolph Giuliani expresses that in government and businesses, organizations tend to base their projections on best-case scenarios. Inappropriate expectations lend to unclear objectives and disappointing outcomes. He goes on to suggest “that a leader must manage not only results but expectations.”
A manufacturer or service vendor will determine their customer’s requirements and will ensure all managers and frontline workers understand what is expected. "We strive to remember the Platinum Rule, says Michael Baugus, CEO of Crossroads Enterprise, Inc. “It encourages us to treat our customers as they would like to be treated rather than the way we like to be treated (the golden rule). This helps us remember that it is our customer that has the final say on whether quality service is being rendered.” For custom cabinetry, a proven contributing factor to customer satisfaction in the gap between the quality of design vs. quality of delivery.
Quality of Design versus Quality of Delivery
When it comes to custom cabinetry, customer satisfaction has roots in two ideas about quality.
1. Quality can be measured by the gap between customers’ expectations and their perceptions. This gap-based view of quality says that if you beat customers’ expectations you have quality.
2. Quality is about conformance to a standard or specification. In this case, quality is about ensuring that the end deliverable to the customer meets the design; and customer satisfaction is about monitoring the quality of delivery of the product and services.
Since these are production focused roots of customer satisfaction, they are sometimes overlooked by firms. At Crossroads, we realize that a kitchen or cabinet project design can in no way be separated from delivering a quality end product. So during our professional design process, we take great care in really defining what our customers are looking for to satisfy their aesthetic tastes and their functional as well as budgetary requirements.
As a result, when the time comes to deliver the product in its finished state, all value contributors—from our design and customer service staff to our factory personnel or a Crossroads Prescreened Pro™ (CPP) that might have contributed value to a project, everyone works from the initial design-blueprint for success. From this blueprint, everyone proceeds with the additional aim to minimize the chances of production errors which also makes customers happy…and saves money.
With the right cabinet design/manufacturing partner who understands that there is wisdom in the statement “it’s always cheaper to do it right the first time” you can mitigate against a potential problem area for customer satisfaction or having to pass on higher service costs.
The Bottom Line
The combined benefits from reduced production errors and satisfied customers far outweigh any costs associated with achieving quality for customers desiring fine custom cabinetry; hence,
Quality is Free!
Stay tuned for part 2 as we look at the next step in the PDCA cycle, 'Do' and the value in Customer Satisfaction Surveys.
Crossroads Custom Cabinetry redefines the U.S. cabinet industry by making premium quality, custom cabinetry widely available at greatly reduced prices. Webinetry.com is a completely new portal for the way today's American consumer can research, preview, budget, and finalize their cabinet purchasing decisions. With our professional network, home improvement professionals enjoy a flow of free qualified sales leads, member pricing and innovative sales support tools that are designed to achieve an optimal selection process with the homeowner.