Business

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has already become a strategic planning solution to thousands of companies, which seek to improve their performance, to secure their competitive position, and to link their strategies to actions. It is essential that small firms can adopt a new BSC vision and to use the BSC as a successful instrument of measuring, improving, and sustaining high level of customer satisfaction and use the latter as the major source of sustained competitive advantage.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has already become a strategic planning solution to thousands of companies, which seek to improve their performance, to secure their competitive position, and to link their strategies to actions. For-profit and non-profit organizations are equally committed to the principles of the BSC and view the BSC as the basic tool of measuring their performance. Small companies use different measurements and approaches to customer-satisfaction. They are equally committed to on-time delivery and lead time as the basic tools of measuring and improving customer satisfaction (Gumbus  Lussier, 2006). Sometimes, customer satisfaction and hassle index are also used to measure how satisfied customers are with the products and or services they get. These measurements were used by small firms to align their performance principles to customer satisfaction and to see how well they were in meeting their business perspectives.

Analysis
That the BSC can become the source of the major competitive benefits to small businesses is difficult to deny measurement and evaluation opportunities which the BSC offers it users should not be underestimated. However, it appears that the use of the BSC as such cannot suffice whenever it comes to the need for companies to improve the quality of their business performance and the level of customer satisfaction. Rather, it is more than important that small businesses are able to adjust the basic BSC principles to their specificity and the nature of their industry, and to make the BSC work for and not against the companys principles and goals. The examples of Hyde Parks Electronics, Future Industries, and Southern Gardens Citrus show that although the BSC always works for the benefit of any companys performance (Gumbus  Lussier, 2006), there is still much room for improvement, and the success of the BSC implementation largely depends on what measures and criteria small businesses choose, to evaluate the level of customer satisfaction.

Companies generally agree upon the need for measuring customer satisfaction and this is particularly important for smaller firms, which are expected to treat every customer in a unique way and to use this uniqueness as the source of their competitive advantage. Small companies that realize the value of the BSC, tend to use one and the same set of customer satisfaction measurements that includes lead time, on-time delivery, sales, and income (Gumbus  Lussier, 2006). Sometimes, small businesses also use hassle index or customer satisfaction index to assess how satisfied customers are with their products and services (Gumbus  Lussier, 2006). Unfortunately, whether these indices are customer-centric is still a matter of debate it would be fair to assume that prior to using the BSC as an instrument of driving customer-centric approaches, companies should be able to answer the three essential questions who the customers are what customers expect from the company and what makes the company different from its competitors, or why customers should choose the company among others (Niven, n.d.). Before companies have answers to these questions, it is hardly possible to guess whether lead time or on-time delivery will serve as the two basic measures of customer-centered approaches. Everything will depend on whether customers view lead time and on-time delivery as the critical measures of their own satisfaction with the product and or service. It is very possible, that customers themselves hold different values and refer to satisfaction measurements other than those, used by small firms. Thus, it is important to take a look at the BSC from the customers and not from the companys perspective. The core of small firms success lay in their ability to assess their current customers, but to make the BSC even more effective, small firms should be able to adopt a long-term vision and to look into the future customer and specific customer needs.

Conclusion
Not all companies view customer satisfaction as the central element of improved performance. Some SMEs will tend to consider learning and growth as the basic prerequisites of their continuous success. For example, Future Industries utilized a BSC to emphasize the learning and growth dimension as the cornerstone for measuring company results (Gumbus  Lussier, 2006). As a result, assessing business from the customers perspective is not always the key contributing factor to improved performance. The relative importance of factors and measures depends on the nature of business, its goals, specificity, and anticipated performance outcomes. It should be noted, that customer-oriented approaches are not always good and beneficial for the company moreover, taking customer satisfaction as the ultimate measure of the companys success is at least incorrect, because such companies are likely to turn their customers into the source of their failures. In their zeal to delight customers, these companies actually lose money with them. They become customer-obsessed rather than customer-focused (Kaplan, 2005). That is why the BSC begins with the word balanced, for the success of such measurements and evaluations begins with the reasonable approach to who customers are, what features they value the most, and what features they would like to see in future products.

Evaluation
Apart from the fact that I would use the three questions provided by Niven (n.d.) as the starting point of consumer satisfaction analysis, I would also add several other customer-oriented dimensions these will include the number of customer complaints the speed of customer service waiting time on the phone lines politeness of the staff personnel and the speed of responding and or reacting to customer complaints (in case there are any). These measures would create a vision of reciprocal relationship between the customer and the product, or the customer and the company that manufactures and or sells this product. I believe that these dimensions will add to small companies ability to reconsider their performance from the customers perspective and will help companies take a reasonable look into the future.