Pitney Bowes is a mail and document servicing company with over $5 billion in sales. From a Pitney Bowes perspective, every single customer is vital to the organization’s success. The company has in-depth conversations with multiple people in an organization to dig deep and understand their needs and concerns. For example, monthly in-depth telephone surveys with multiple contacts at each customer company explore sales support, machine performance, response time, satisfaction with service reps, ease of doing business, and overall satisfaction.

If customers report that they are merely satisfied, service managers have three days to resolve problems and develop an action plan to make customers happy. Managers review satisfaction results each week and analytic teams looks for trends by region, sales rep, models, etc., to drive strategies and new programs. Reports track satisfaction but, more importantly, help uncover what drives satisfaction. 

The goal is to talk about specifics but also to explore whether they would recommend Pitney Bowes and how it ranks among their most trusted providers. If Pitney Bowes is not the absolute best, it wants to find out what it needs to do to excel in their eyes.

Dramatic increase 

Since reengineering its measurement program several years ago, Pitney Bowes has seen a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction and business performance. Today, 86 percent of customers report that they are very satisfied, and 96 percent of customers would recommend Pitney Bowes.

Other divisions within Pitney Bowes provide desktop applications to millions of customers who conduct millions of transactions every day. “Many of our customers purchase technology online and never actually meet with a Pitney Bowe representative, so we needed to build a robust mechanism that made it easy for us to capture, hear, and analyze customer concerns,” says Gael Lundeen, vice president of customer experience for Pitney Bowes. Highlights of this measurement program include: 

• Monthly e-mail surveys that focus on 20 critical customerfacing processes. Over the past 16 months, more than 180,000 customer satisfaction surveys have been completed. 

• If any customers report that they are dissatisfied, the appropriate business units are alerted. They respond and are required to report results. 

• As part of the survey process, customers are also asked to contribute ideas and suggestions. To date, 25 percent of customers have responded, which has led to 44,000 new ideas. 

Questions 

1. What are the various types of surveys that could be used to measure satisfaction? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of each? 

2. Should customer satisfaction be measured daily? If yes, isn’t this very expensive? Why measure every day? 

3. Assume that you have 2,000 customers, and 95 percent of your customers are very satisfied. Isn’t that good enough? 

4. Is it important to know why a customer is satisfied? Why?