Improving Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Profit

About the Authors

Michael D. Johnson is a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan Business School. His expertise lies in customer satisfaction and loyalty, which he has extensively researched and written about.

Anders Gustafsson is an associate professor of business economics in the Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden. He specializes in service management and customer satisfaction, contributing significantly to the field through research and publications.

Main Idea

"Improving Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Profit: An Integrated Measurement and Management System" by Michael D. Johnson and Anders Gustafsson offers a structured approach to understanding and enhancing customer satisfaction. The book presents a five-step process that helps companies link their processes with customer needs to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability.

Table of Contents

1. Creating a Customer Measurement and Management System
2. Strategy and Planning
3. Building the Lens of the Customer
4. Building the Quality-Satisfaction-Loyalty Survey
5. From Data to Information
6. From Information to Decisions

Creating a Customer Measurement and Management System

The book begins by emphasizing the importance of aligning company activities to satisfy and retain customers. It introduces a systems approach to gather and interpret data, allocate resources, and make necessary changes to meet customer needs. The key to success lies in understanding what customers want and continuously improving to meet those expectations.

"You keep customers from straying to the competition by giving them every reason to stay and no reason to switch." – Michael D. Johnson and Anders Gustafsson

The authors highlight three key activities to become customer-oriented:

• Gathering customer information to understand their needs.
• Spreading that information throughout the company to inform decision-making.
• Using the information to maintain, improve, and innovate products and processes.

• Using surveys and feedback forms to gather customer insights.
• Sharing customer feedback with all departments to align goals.
• Implementing changes based on customer feedback to enhance products.

Strategy and Planning

In this section, the authors discuss the importance of internal quality in driving financial performance. They highlight three basic strategies for successful quality management: using reference models or benchmarks, setting priorities for quality improvement, and focusing resources to achieve those improvements. Policy deployment, also known as hoshin planning, is introduced as a method to convert strategic plans into actionable steps.