Some things that make customers dissatisfied are intuitive, obvious things. If you ship them the wrong item or don’t show up on time to a service call, the customer is going to be unhappy. But there are other things you might not be aware of which is where your feedback process comes in handy. You can gain insight into the obvious and not so obvious drivers of customer frustration. Once you’re able to tune in to the current customer experience and compare that to customer needs and expectations, you can start anticipating areas of potential dissatisfaction. And once you can anticipate an event that causes dissatisfaction, you can start to set up internal alerts to get ahead of the process failure before it impacts your customer.

All areas of potential dissatisfaction are worth your focus and effort, but to get started, I suggest picking a problem for which you feel it would be relatively easy to set up an alert.  Ultimately, you either want to focus on the problem that occurs with the highest frequency (allowing you to impact the most customers) or the problem that makes the customers most mad (biggest pain point). But to get your feet wet with a proactive approach to dissatisfaction, try one of your ‘low hanging fruit’ items. This way you can figure out the approach that fits best with your operations and culture.

What I mean by an alert is that you want to create some type of indicator with-in your process that triggers a notification to a person that will intervene when something is about to go wrong…BEFORE it goes wrong. Proactive quality control allows you to save the customer from experiencing the failure that will cause them to be dissatisfied.

Here’s an example. Say you have a business that schedules service appointments on a customer premise. Your organization has a process to notify customers of the details of their appointment because customers get frustrated when that information is not effectively communicated. You could set up an alert that is triggered to a customer service team if the appointment is 24 hours out and no notification has been sent. Then, your customer service team can take proactive action on notifying the customer before it’s too late. Another scenario:  the service person assigned to help the customer is going to be late to the appointment. Can you anticipate that and take corrective action by sending someone else? Whatever the process may be, think about how you can (a) trigger the alert and (b) take corrective action.

Also, instead of reporting on the number of failures after the fact, you can report on the number of alerts that were triggered before a customer impacting error occurred. Both reports would show the same information and both would allow you to coach to the proper process, but proactive method does not allow the customer to become dissatisfied.

It may not always be feasible to correct a process so that the errors never occur, but with a proactive approach you can stand between your errors and the customer ensuring they have the best possible experience.