Customer satisfaction in the textile industry: what and how to measure

White paper by Rovetex. The original paper is available as a PDF.

Introduction

Many books and documents have been written about Customer Satisfaction (CS). This short paper does not try to cover every methodological aspect. It is a practical contribution for people who prepare data gathering, processing — including with the help of information systems — and evaluation systems, in particular in mid-sized textile companies.

It can be read in two ways:

• As a practical guide for a company planning a project to create data and measures of customer satisfaction.
• As the methodological basis for Rovetex assignments in which Rovetex helps prepare a Quality Assurance System (QAS).

For companies that decide — after creating a QAS — to obtain ISO 9001 certification, a customer satisfaction control system is indispensable and explicitly required by the standard (ISO 9001:2000, clause 8.2.1, Customer Satisfaction).

Customer satisfaction indicators

Attention to customer needs — and measuring how well the product or service delivered matches what was asked for — is relatively recent.

Without wishing to be polemical, this approach did not arise from companies’ wish to understand customers better, but from tougher competition from cheaper products. This has created two worlds. In the same market sector, often in the same distribution channel, there are:

• simple and/or very cheap products, where the customer has low expectations, and
• more expensive products or known brands, where the customer has high expectations — and therefore needs.

The first customer will be satisfied with a market stall and a plastic bag; the second will not. If your customer belongs to the second group, measuring and controlling customer satisfaction becomes important. Greater added value is what earns the premium price that distinguishes the second group from the first — and control of customer satisfaction is part of that added value.

Company data for customer satisfaction control

In many companies where our consultancy work has taken us, we have seen a proliferation of data, tables and processing. Managers and assistants are busy preparing schedules, transferring values and writing reports. When these reports are circulated they are often incompatible — sometimes even contradictory — which only multiplies the work.

It can reach the point — not at all hypothetical — where the original data has been processed so much, by so many people, that it is no longer relevant. That is not quality.

In our opinion, all company data that will be used to evaluate customer satisfaction must come from the company database, not from individual, uncontrolled gathering. Office tools can still be used to process the data, but the data must have one single and certain origin.

Creating a company index

It can be useful — though not indispensable — to create a general company index of customer satisfaction.

All the key figures of company management should be involved in building it, together with the person responsible for the company’s information systems. The company must identify the most important values that its history, the experience of its managers and the advisers creating the QAS consider representative.

These values are weighted by importance to give an index number that can be monitored at fixed intervals — a kind of immediate measure of company efficiency.

Example of a summary table

Indicator	Weight	Value in March 2001
Abbb	20	250
Cccc	20	450
Dddc	20	130
Zzzz	40	600
Total of the month	100	1430

By calculating the index continuously, the company obtains a trend chart of its customer satisfaction over time — in the original example, the index moved from about 1,230 in 1999 to 1,430 in March 2001.