Kaizen efforts can put customer satisfaction at risk when people fail to understand what it is that the customer assesses as value. In this month's CRM Magazine, Lior Arussy urges us to Meet Expectations before Trying to Exceed Them. He says that a company's restrictive procedures are often at the source of not meeting expectations.
"The first order of business in meeting customers' expectations is to identify those conflicting procedures and remove them."
"Why do you say that?" is a more important question.
He couples this with four questions to identify where policy is getting in the way of goals:
- "Are these the procedures of a customer-centric company?
- "Are they designed to protect and delight customers, or to protect and delight CEOs?