Consulting

StiehlWorks Offers Consulting in These Areas:

“Voice of the Customer/Pain of the Customer(Member)” Projects

The accurate description and organization of the Voice of the Customer (Pain of the Customer) is a frequent project objective for StiehlWorks. These projects result in an articulated hierarchy of customer needs expressed in their language and organized and prioritized by them, in the way that the customer thinks of them. These projects form the foundation for customer satisfaction surveys, the development of internal metrics, the House of Quality and strategic planning. These techniques work very well for associations who wish to understand the needs of their membership.

Back to Top

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) "House of Quality"

Chris learned these techniques at General Motors. He has almost 28 years of experience in QFD and related techniques. The House of Quality is used to choose the best design characteristics for investment to have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction – whether it is for a product design or process specifications.

Back to Top

Customer Satisfaction

Many organizations collect customer satisfaction data, but how many know what to do with the data once they have it? The keys to measuring customer satisfaction are to ask the right questions and have internal metrics that are predictive of satisfying customers. A score from a customer satisfaction survey should never be a surprise. Questionnaires that are derived from an articulated Voice of the Customer lead to higher response rates and actionable data since the respondents can easily relate to the questions.

Back to Top

Benchmarking

Benchmarking involves finding comparative data to measure against the performance of your organization and set standards. Chris Stiehl has been an invited speaker at the International Conference on Benchmarking and has taught several companies the methods used in winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

Back to Top

 

Executive Interviews [one-on-one]

This technique is a specialty for StiehlWorks, as this technique is most often used to derive the Voice of the Customer. StiehlWorks has conducted one-on-one studies for respondents as young as teen-agers and as sophisticated as CEOs and presidents of companies. These skills can be taught, and StiehlWorks offers courses in the techniques.

Back to Top

"Voice of the Employee" and Related Employee Retention Strategies

 

The Voice of the Customer techniques have been used to develop a Voice of the Employee in some organizations. This allows the management of an organization to develop metrics for employees’ satisfaction and performance. These measures then can be used to predict internal metrics related to customer satisfaction. Many employee surveys (the so-called “standardized” ones) ask what management wants to know. The StiehlWorks techniques discover what employees want to say, and what they need to perform better.

Back to Top

Defining Predictive Customer-focused Internal Metrics

Every organization tracks internal metrics (i.e., the “balanced scorecard” or “dashboard”), but how many are truly customer-focused? How many internal metrics are directly related to predicting customer satisfaction and how many are measures of outcomes? Most companies have metrics that are outcome-oriented that are like looking in the rearview mirror. StiehlWorks can help you devise internal metrics that are predictive of customer outcomes. An example would be: how do you measure the freshness of popcorn at a movie theater? Many companies would ask customers (after the fact, external) rather than merely measure how many minutes the popcorn has been in the bin (predictive, internal).

Back to Top