IBM takes a lot of customer satisfaction measurements, and there is a pretty good system for looking at trends and taking action if/when there are weaknesses.
Just last month somebody surveyed customer satisfaction at an IBM conference where I spoke, and my manager and I both got those results. (They were very good, fortunately.) At least in my part of the world (and in my personal experience) management puts a lot of focus and pressure on customer satisfaction, and a lot of employees have formal targets set, even with bonuses tied to achieving certain levels of satisfaction. The survey people are kept independent and might not even be IBM employees. As another example, I had a position (for many years) covered by survey people who would ask customers an open ended question: "Is there anyone at IBM who you found especially helpful?" (The question is/was at least similar to that.) And then there's a follow-up question, to rate that person's performance on a scale of 1 to 10. (The opposite question is/was also asked, I think with the ressurance that the customer's identity would be protected.) The whole extended team -- thousands of people, usually -- would get quarterly reports which published the names of anybody mentioned by a customer and scoring a 9 or 10. Managers would frequently award bonuses on that basis, and of course almost everybody got the hint. Low scorers were (ahem) "handled" privately. High scorers tended to make better career progress. And in many countries we have an internal program called "Thanks!" which, in my experience anyway, encourages employees to help each other, particularly across teams, to break down some of the bureaucracy. Yes, I'm sure IBM support people want to close PMRs as quickly as they can. But (in general) that's only because they want to resolve the actual problem(s) quickly, because both speed and quality count. How quickly problems are resolved strongly correlates with customer satisfaction, too. If you don't want a PMR closed, though, don't close it. (And, if you do close one, there's a lot of time available to reopen it if you need.) Customer service is much "art," not just science, and it takes a lot of time and effort to teach that. Speaking only for myself. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
