ABSTRACT
An important first step in becoming a customer-focused organization is to do a good job of segmenting customers and determining the needs and desires of each group of customers. The three most common approaches to identifying customer requirements are: assuming one already knows what customers want; asking customers what they want and expect; and determining their requirements through their feedback and by seeing what they complain about. However, none of these approaches is very effective. The most important characteristic of a good set of metrics that relates to customer satisfaction is to have a mix of hard and soft measures. Soft measures are measures of customer opinions, perceptions, and feelings. These data need to be supplemented with hard measures of customer satisfaction—measures of what customers do, not what they say. Repeat and lost business are the overall best hard measures of customer satisfaction.
