BUSINESS CRITERIA: ITEM AND CATEGORY DESCRIPTIONS
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3.2 Customer Relationships and Satisfaction

Purpose

This Item examines your organization’s processes for building customer relationships and determining customer satisfaction, with the aim of acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers, and developing new market opportunities.

Comments

- This Item emphasizes how you obtain actionable information from customers. Information that is actionable can be tied to key product, service, and business processes and be used to determine cost and revenue implications for setting improvement goals and priorities for change.

- Complaint aggregation, analysis, and root cause determination should lead to effective elimination of the causes of complaints and to the setting of priorities for process, product, and service improvements. Successful outcomes require effective deployment of information throughout the organization.

- In determining customers’ satisfaction, a key aspect is their comparative satisfaction with competitors and competing or alternative offerings. Such information might be derived from your own comparative studies or from independent studies. The factors that lead to customer preference are of critical importance in understanding factors that drive markets and potentially affect longer-term competitiveness and organizational sustainability.

- Changing business needs and directions might include changing modes of customer access, such as the Internet. In such cases, key contact requirements might include on-line security for customers and access to personal assistance.

Item Description Links: 1.1 - 1.2 - 2.1 - 2.2 - 3.1 - 3.2 - 4.1 - 4.2 - 5.1 - 5.2 - 5.3 - 6.1 - 6.2 - 7.1 - 7.2 - 7.3 - 7.4 - 7.5 - 7.6 - P.1 - P.2

Note: All information above relates to Item descriptions. All information below relates to the actual Criteria.

2006 Criteria Items: 1.1 - 1.2 - 2.1 - 2.2 - 3.1 - 3.2 - 4.1 - 4.2 - 5.1 - 5.2 - 5.3 - 6.1 - 6.2 - 7.1 - 7.2 - 7.3 - 7.4 - 7.5 - 7.6 - P.1 - P.2

Click to download a copy of 2006 Baldrige Actionable Criteria