Quality Digest

As an ETO Enterprise, continued purchases by your customers are your lifeblood... So lose the effort to track and manage measurement 'data' and try something different... I learned this three question questionnaire over a decade ago - and it's served me well ever since...
1. What three things do we need to do to KEEP your business?
2. What hree things do we need to do - to GROW our relationship with you by 10%?
3. What hree hings do we need to do before you would recommend us to your three closest friends?

These quesions get to the heart of the matter - making your customer SUCCESSFUL and not merely satisfied... Try them the answers may astound you...
For more information - call me
R/
Jeffrey Edwards
Alchemists Intl
Turning Lead Into Gold

001.904.276.0067

Customers routinely provide vital feedback regarding their satisfaction or dissatisfaction but most businesses fail to capture that data.

You have people in your organization that interface with your customers. If you treat every contact with a customer as an opportunity to guage their satisfaction and train your employees to capture that data, you will be doing a lot better than most organizations.

Do that and you won't have a need for ineffective surveys and your customers will be amazed that you actually take the time to listen to them.

J. Littlefield

Have you tried telephone or email surveys?

Karen

Try picking up a copy of "Customer Satisfaction Measurement simplified" by Terry Vavra. This book was a big help to us.

We utilize customer surveys but we make it a point to deliver them personally to our customers. This serves as a PR visit and has also increased the chances of getting the surveys back.

This is one of the most difficult requirements in the current Standard. Not only is the clause poorly drafted in that it doesn't provide clear guidance on intent, but it appears that the committee didn't really know where they were going with the requirement anyway.
The interpretation we have always used is that the intent was that an organization should be doing something that is pro-active rather than merely reactive. So customer complaints form part of the customer satisfaction data as well but obviously not all of it. But we have all known that for a long time.
5% on a survey - assuming that you just sent questionnaires out - isn't bad but I agree with you that the data pretty meaningless.
One approach which I have used with many client companies is to take the following steps:
1. Identify all the various people (functions) in the organization who speak directly to customers.
2. Identify the areas of interest of each individual - price, quality, delivery etcetera.
3. Construct a questionnaire which covers all the things which you believe are of interest to your customers. Remember to balance out things like on time delivery with responsiveness to queries, courtesy on the telephone, promptness of response and please include paperwork accuracy. Finally add to the list a question along the lines of 'Anything else you'd like us to know?'.
4. Now take the list of questions and provide them to each individual - probably divided up by individual and type of contact - who speaks to the customer along with a record sheet. Each day each individual should work one or more of the questions into each conversation with a customer and record the name of the customer, the question and the response. This should be done as naturally as possible.
This way your customers won't actually know that they are being surveyed, you will collect views from all the various people you deal with at each customer site. And don't be surprised if they differ - the consequent data will enable you to really make improvements so that everyone loves you!
So a notation on the record sheet might read something like:

(The question was about on-time delivery)

Department: Manufacturing
Company: BAE
Question: 7
Response: On-time OK, all items OK. We can always rely on you.

In other words, cryptic comment capturing the essence of the issue, or non-issue. The other advantage of using this sort of approach is that you get a bunch of different people in the organization thinking about customer satisfaction, not simply by talking about it but through being actively involved in collecting the data.

Hope this helps - first used with a small family business, since seen effective in many organizations of varying size.

Rod Goult, The Victoria Group, Inc.

We send a 10 question survey to our Key Customers asking them to strongly agree (5 points) or strongly disagree (1 point) (can select 2,3,or 4) to questions re: contacting us, getting answers, knowing my needs, right product, on-time, & price for value & performance. Ratings have been good, comments more helpful. Responses rate 30%. Two surveys averaged a rating of 4.4. Surveys always require ACTION.

I don't know what type of survey you conducted,but try telephone surveys which allow you to speak directly with the customer. User or focus groups with your customers is another way to obtain customer satisfaction. If it's a part of your processes, you can review any customer and product trends through the data in your defect tracking database(s) to identify those areas customers may not be satisfied with.