Going Face to Face With Your Customers - Quality Digest
Ford invited car owners to bring their vehicles and meet with vehicle engineers, as well as marketing and manufacturing teams, to discuss their experiences behind the wheel. The Irvine clinic convened customers who own 2015 Ford Mustang, 2015 Lincoln MKC and 2014 Ford Transit Connect automobiles to discuss topics including technology features such as SYNC, driver usability, design functionally, and product appearance. Shaking hands and saving paper “Our corporate quality process is really focused around the customer, so we gather a lot of customer data,” says Dan Lymburner, the Americas product development quality manager at Ford. “Externally we have sources like J. D. Powers, Consumer Reports, Strategic Reports, and we also have sources of internal data. Ford has a lot of smart people who can plot out the data, put it into Pareto charts, and slice it up, but until you really understand what the customer means when they check a box or the words they write down [in a survey], it’s really not very... Because while it’s nice to have their data, it’s really nice to have a conversation about what their experience has been in the vehicle. Although surveys at the dealership, along with customer service calls and analyzing social conversation, are great ways to stay connected with customers, good old-fashioned face-to-face conversation—even in the year 2015—is still invaluable. Source: www.qualitydigest.com
