Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; Oct. 8, 2007—David Mangen, Ph.D., President of Mangen Research Associates, and Dick Lee, Principal of High-Yield Methods, are announcing the launch of a web-based survey that allows executives and managers to gauge their companies’ progress along the customer alignment continuum. The authors based this self-survey on their many years’ combined experience “sizing up” client and prospective client capability to become better customer-aligned and identifying what’s helping clients and what’s holding them back.
According to Lee, “We designed the survey to allow management to take a hard look in the mirror—and help some companies take off the corporate, rose colored glasses.”
Mangen adds, “While survey-takers will receive an instant score plus interpretive material, the ‘big bang’ will likely come from just answering the questions. We focused our questions on actual behaviors, rather than attitude or intent, making it very difficult to sidestep issues.”
The survey, which asks 45 multiple choice questions, is available online at Mangen Research Associates and High-Yield Methods.
While primarily hands-on practitioners, Mangen and Lee have collaborated on five previous research studies in the CRM/CEM space including: Multi-Function CRM Software: How Good Is It? (with Bob Thompson), which disproved Siebel Systems’ widely believed claims of extremely high customer satisfaction; and last year’s Customers Say What Companies Don’t Want To Hear.
Individually, they have each written several books and numerous journal articles on customer issues.
The Customer-Alignment Self-Survey was a good test for gauging how far we have made it down the customer centric path. The inference is that sales, marketing and customer service need to work as one. Today in most companies these are operations that work independently of each other. Until this changes we may not be able to make it down the last leg of the path.