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Govt. Certified Six Sigma Black Belt

Customer Identification

A successful business knows its customers – who they are, what their expectations are and what they think of the products or services. More importantly, a successful business continually improves its processes, reassesses its ability to meet customer needs, and gathers customer data to keep well appraised of changing customer needs and expectations.

There are many different types of customer data and many ways for a business to obtain it. Some customer data is available to virtually any business in the form of complaints, returns and refunds. Additional customer data can be obtained through surveys, focus groups, face-to-face interviews and feedback cards. And all of these can be used to identify Six Sigma projects to improve customer satisfaction.

By reviewing and analyzing customer data, any business can identify the top issues causing customer dissatisfaction and identify the appropriate Six Sigma projects needed to address those issues. Assessing the performance of the business and improving its processes leads to increased customer satisfaction which, generally, translates to increased revenue.

Internal Customers
An internal customer is the one who is affected by the product or service as it is being generated. The internal customer is sometimes forgotten in the effort to produce an item or service for the external customer. The immediate goal should be to produce the product or service in a simple and convenient manner for internal consumption. The effort to remember ‘to do’ things in a specific way, to be trained properly, to be given the proper equipment or to be given specific instructions can often be neglected.

Internal customers are often employees of the committee. Kaoru lshikawa (1985) coined “The next operation as customer” in order to remove the sectionalism of departments towards each other. The essential idea is to enable employees of all departments to come together to solve problems. Staff members must consider themselves as service providers. Otherwise, the staff members are in constant struggle with the line management and nothing gets done. Within a company, the staff should consider what kind of work they can perform for the line departments.

Research has shown that management practices relate to employee satisfaction, which also impacts customer satisfaction. When employees are satisfied with their treatment, given the right tools to do the job and supported by management; customers are more likely to have higher perceptions of quality and will continue to do business with the company.