Customer Satisfaction

ISO 9001 section 8.2.1 states:
"As one of the measurements of the performance of the quality management system, the organization shall monitor information relating to customer perception as to whether the organization has met customer requirements.  The mehtods for obtaining and using this information shall be determined."

Measuring customer satisfaction means understanding what your customers think.  There are many ways to glean this information including:

• Customer data such as quality and on time delivery reports
• Customer compliments or complaints
• Warranty claims
• Customer satisfaction surveys

The problem with the first method is that most customers don’t provide them, so you’ll only hear from a few customers and at most monthly.  It’s hard to generalize from just a few customer reports.

Customer compliments are rarer still.  It’s more common to hear from a customer when something goes wrong than when you’ve done something right.  Complaints tell what’s going wrong, but do not reflect the good the organization is doing.

Warranty claims are a good way to tell what goes wrong and how much it’s costing.   With this type of data, preventive actions can be focused and feedback on the effectiveness of actions taken will show up in a short time.

Perhaps the best way to monitor customer satisfaction is to ask your customers what they think.  Toward this end, customer satisfaction surveys are a preferred method of listening to customers.  There are many ways to implement these:

• Bingo cards - A bingo card is a small post card on which you ask a few questions and allow the customer to rate each question on a scale like 1 – 5. The other side has your address.They are typically placed in packaging are perhaps the least effective survey method. Few customers complete and return them.The card usually goes to the wrong department.A receiving department will probably just throw them out. It’s unlikely that they will get to the end user, and when they do, the end user is unlikely to return them. I tried these for several years and got less than a 1% return.
•  On line surveys from web sites like SurveyMonkey.com can be helpful, but again, the customer must be motivated to go to the site and complete the survey. Some companies run contests and award prizes as an enticement. Some retailers even offer discounts on future purchases for completing the survey. They get the data they want, and possibly produce another sale.    
• Salesmen’s feedback – One approach is to require the sales force to contact their customers periodically and ask a few well designed questions. The salesman completes a survey form and turns it in for analysis. This can be a good source of data, but the customer will be reluctant to indicate that the salesman is not meeting their expectations.
• The best method I’ve seen is the telemarketing survey. Telemarketers, properly trained, can get to the end user, ask a short list of well-designed questions, and get good feedback which can be analyzed and studied. At the same time, the telemarketer will probe the customer for other potential business. While costly, a well designed and implemented telemarketing survey will reward the company with excellent data, and additional sales that may exceed the cost of the survey.

Whatever method you choose, keep in mind that you should be able to analyze  the data and draw conclusions.  For help with this topic go to www.rosehillsystems.com