One of the most important elements of Six Sigma is customer satisfaction, because without it, your business is not doing its job. Yes you heard that right, your business has a job and that is to keep the customers happy and coming back.

Customer complaints, although hard to take, are to be thought of as the voice of the customer and are very important. VOC is to be heard and not ignored, since the customer is frequenting your establishment and spending his or her hard-earned money. They deserve the best your business can offer.

A few important points:

• Listen to what the complaint is (what is the source of the issue?)
• Get your Pareto Chart and determine the problems or causes in a process (Root Cause Analysis)
• Next, get the DMAIC template: Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control

With the Pareto Chart and Root Cause Analysis, you will find out what is causing the issue. When you feel you have found the cause, now it is time to eliminate this issue. If the issue is not eliminated, then your customer will just eliminate himself or herself from your business!

Customer Loyalty

By taking the time to listen to VOC and then taking the time to fix the issue, you will encourage customer loyalty, because the customer feels that they have been heard and valued. Think about it: your customer picked your establishment to spend their money…don’t they deserve to be heard?  Customer loyalty is priceless.

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Time Management

Six Sigma aims to ensure your products are of high quality, while delivered promptly and efficiently. Slow delivery is one of the most common causes of customer complaints. Good time management is essential to ensuring your business’s success, and will also facilitate growth for your business too. Customers don’t like it when you break your promises. If you promise to deliver a product or complete a service by a certain date, you better deliver. Time constraints can be tricky to manage for any company, especially smaller ones, but they are still essential. Remember, it’s important to plan accordingly to ensure you complete all associated tasks and processes. The sooner you make the change, the sooner your customer complaints will start to drop.

Costs and Management of Resources

Six Sigma can also help to make your business a more cost-effective one. Everything costs something, these days, and your customers can be very particular about price. If they expect a different price to the one they’re expecting, they’re likely to tell you about it. Complaints will almost always follow when the customer sees something they don’t like. As such, it’s important to manage your resources effectively, so you can keep track of which tasks fall below or exceed the budget.

Businesses rely on profit, and it’s often necessary to take measures to make back that profit, but going back on your word is not the way to do it. Customer complaints can cause more trouble in the long-term. As such, it’s better to practice good time and resource management so that you can stay on top of these problems. That way, you’ll be able to prevent complaints from occurring in the first place.

Customer Feedback

Feedback is important for all endeavors, especially when customer satisfaction is involved. Customer feedback can be enlightening, providing a great insight into the minds of your customers. You shouldn’t be expected to adapt to all customer demands, as this isn’t always feasible. But paying attention to customer feedback, whether from surveys, feedback forms, etc. will allow you to take action. Using Six Sigma along with rich data from customers, you can make your processes more efficient and improve the quality of your products. If there’s nothing to complain about, your customers won’t complain!

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