Improving customer satisfaction: emerging lessons about strategy and implementation

A six-phase strategy has been developed and tested to strategically improve customer satisfaction across an entire managed care system. This article summarizes the theoretical underpinnings of the approach and highlights the first two phases of the overall strategy. Emerging lessons about strategy and implementation are described. A follow-up article will include a description of the last four phases of the strategy and a summary of initial results associated with the implementation of this approach.