How Do You Figure The Cost of Doing Nothing? Part 2

On Friday we took our first look at quantifying the costs of doing nothing.  Two more important costs need to be weighed, customer satisfaction levels and productivity rate.
 
How does customer satisfaction impact your bottom line?  Can you measure it?  Turns out those researchers at Harvard Business School have identified that every 1.3% increase in customer satisfaction scores equals .5% increase in sales.  Let’s look at this from two points of view.  First, how will customer satisfaction levels drop if you’re scrambling Jan 1st try to and get everything put into place?  My guess is quite a bit.  But in addition to that, what happens if you take proactive leadership and not only have your organization well versed in RESPA changes, but also can assist your customer partners?  Might you see an uptick in customer satisfaction levels?  I’m getting e-mails from some of you who are using your increasing RESPA knowledge to escalate the quality of your relationships with clients.  Those of you who have begun re-engineering your processes with customers are already seeing the benefits of early preparation (Lauren Schmitt, Leslie Sanya and others, feel free to post a comment sharing your success stories!)
 
What % of their potential do your employees operate within?  Will their productivity be increased or decreased if you wait to engage them in RESPA compliance? You can easily look at and calculate costs based on annual sales and current productivity rates vs. reduced productivity rates.
 
It turns out there is a cost to doing nothing, and I hope you will quantify them for your organization.   Here’s a link to the calculator from Ken Blanchard’s website.  You might be thinking “Okay, but what about the costs associated with RESPA preparation?”  Most education on RESPA issues is free, talking with customers about it is free, taking time to meet as an organization and plan your changes, minimal.  If you’re afraid of sinking costs into preparation for something that may not happen, how much will you lose if you don’t and it does?