Proactive approaches to understanding customers include: personal interviews,
focus groups, designed surveys, benchmarking and mystery shoppers. These
approaches provide a high level of understanding.
Contrast these approaches with analyzing unsolicited complaints. The reactive
approach can provide only a low level of understanding because the data obtained
is from a biased, non representative set of customers. In addition, customers may
fail to complain because the effort to do so exceeds any advantage or may lead to
undesirable repercussions.
Structured interviews involve a specialized body of knowledge associated with systems analysis and management consulting. The interview technique is important in obtaining not only facts known to be necessary, but also facts that may be important in decision making. Typically, the systems analyst or management consultant will prepare a short list of broad areas related to the area of investigation. The individual being interviewed is asked to comment in general about the area and then questioning follows a depth first strategy. Often, interviews are confidential; this overcomes problems associated with the reactive approach to collecting information.
Focus groups are a proactive strategy that can provide a high level of understanding regarding process improvement and customer expectations. The focus groups can offer insights that are impossible to capture through surveys or even through interviews with individual customers.
Surveys represent a broad field of knowledge associated with statistics and social science. Survey design is important in reducing the bias of those using the results and in obtaining high response rates. Typically, independent consultants are used to design surveys and tabulate results.
Benchmarking is a proactive strategy that can provide a high level of understanding regarding process improvement and customer expectations. It is the search for the best practices and an understanding of how those practices are achieved. There are four kinds of benchmarking.
The mystery shopper is a proactive strategy that can provide a high level of understanding regarding process improvement and customer expectations. It may involve planting employees at organizations the firm supplies.
|
|
|
|
|
http://www.eskimo.com/~mighetto/lsproact - last update August 15, 2000.
 |
This topic is included in Decision Maker's smart database. Select the icon to display an imagemap. |