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How Satisfied Are Your Customers?

A nationwide industry survey harnesses customer feedback for companies to use in attracting and retaining customers.

Winning and maintaining customer loyalty is a constant challenge among businesses. Ironically, it often puts too much emphasis on what the company is giving rather than what the customer is getting. In reality, what one says is not always what the other hears, and, as a result, tremendous efforts and resources are wasted on what often becomes a one-way conversation.

Many organizations have set up programs that engage their customers and measure customer satisfaction levels. In the drive for service excellence, Singapore has established the Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG), an extensive, nationwide program that surveys end users about their satisfaction with companies across sectors and subsectors of Singapore’s services industry. The CSISG was launched in 2007, and since then it has grown to cover eight core economic sectors, 40 subsectors and more than 100 companies.

This independent qualitative survey of how well Singapore’s economy is performing has become the national barometer of customer satisfaction in Singapore, as well as an objective gauge of service competitiveness between countries. It offers businesses customer satisfaction scores for their company and competitive insights into best-in-class organizations across their industry.

CSISG was jointly developed by the Institute of Service Excellence at the Singapore Management University (ISES) and the Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA), and is based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which has been in existence since 1994.

In Singapore, ISES is integral to the government’s initiatives to raise service standards and promote a culture of service excellence across the city-state. Its activities in the field run from benchmarking research across companies, sectors and subsectors to engagement with the most senior levels of organizations in both private-sector and government agencies.

The CSISG is the central activity of the ISES. The CSISG reports customer satisfaction scores of companies in eight sectors, including: private and public education, finance and insurance, food and beverage, healthcare, info-communications, retail, tourism, and transportation and logistics. Companies reference the results of the CSISG for competitive benchmarking and review their performance in the CSISG against their service strategies.

Through its diagnostic capabilities, CSISG identifies key drivers with the most significant impact on overall customer satisfaction. This is a useful guide for organizations seeking to optimize their resources to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The annual CSISG subscription program is exclusive to companies that are measured by the Index. The program provides a regular measure of customer satisfaction using methods that constantly monitor a company’s performance and quantify the financial impact of enhanced customer satisfaction.

Under the program, corporate subscribers obtain two powerful strategic capabilities: benchmarking and predictive analysis.

Benchmarking is done with industry competitors across various dimensions measured in the CSISG model. These dimensions include customer satisfaction, customer expectations, perceived quality, customer perception of value, incidence of customer complaints, customer loyalty and likelihood of repurchase.

Meanwhile, predictive analysis offers insight into how to increase the chances that customers will make further purchases, and helps companies to best reallocate their resources toward improving customer satisfaction and retention. The impact analysis provides companies with an understanding of the financial impact of improving customer satisfaction.

CSISG also provides custom research to quantify brand equity and develop performance of improvement initiatives to companies not measured in the CSISG.

Ultimately, the program delivers customer feedback to companies in the form of a powerful business tool that they can leverage for improved productivity and profitability. And with such mission-critical feedback, companies can deliver products and services that can better meet customers’ expectations.

For more information, contact the Institute of Service Excellence at Singapore Management University:

Tel: 65 6828 0111

E-mail: ise@smu.edu.sg

Web site: www.smu.edu.sg/centres/ises