Rapid Cycle Improvement: Accounting for buying cycles

This interesting article discusses Rapid Cycle Improvement and how surveying customers once a year may not be enough.  If your customers only purchase from you once every 3-5 years, then you may not see a drop off in sales for a year or two.  My experience in advertising taught me that businesses selling cars, houses, mattresses or other other long buying cycle items can’t run an advertising program for just a week or even a month.  By doing so, a company would be throwing their dollars away; they would only touch those people who are interested in the product or service at that specific point in time.  Which is likely going to be a miniscule population.

Cars, Houses, Mattresses, Software and other large items aren’t like burgers. People make those purchases infrequently. Therefore, a customer feedback campaign has to account for that time span, and it must be ongoing.  Much like advertising must account for people’s buying habits, customer surveys need to account for their satisfaction when they buy.  Disney‘s rapid-cycle improvement concept takes this customer satisfaction and frequency of surveying into account.  It works well in both healthcare and automotive.  I know this also holds true for other industries with long buying cycles, like housing, software, and multi-family.

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Continuing communications is the key to customer service