IMPROVING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION with KAIZEN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Today, customer expectations have increased and diversified due to reasons development of technology and rising in living standards. To manage customer expectations, organizations need to understand what customers expect from them. Understanding can be achieved through means such as conducting market research, analysing customer feedback and monitoring industry trends. Organizations that align their services with customer expectations can enhance customer experiences. Positive customer experiences enable organizations to gain competitive advantage in the market, strengthen their image, and contributes to long-term relationships with customers. Therefore, customer satisfaction is important for organizations. Activities that organizations offer but do not create a value perceived by customers, are waste. Kaizen, a continuous improvement approach from Lean Management tools, purposes to eliminate waste, improve service quality, meet customer requirements and optimize the system, in other words, to aim for perfection. This study, a customer satisfaction survey is formed to measure customer satisfaction, to evaluate service quality and to define operations that requirement to be improved. To understand numerical data obtained from the survey answered by customers who purchased security services from Ekol Group, arithmetic mean and standard deviation values are calculated and a statistical analysis is performed. Based on the analysis, processes that needed improvement were identified and a Kaizen action plan was implemented to achieve improvements. The findings show that the application of Kaizen at Ekol Group increased customer satisfaction rate.