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Day 3: Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey

Integrated Workplace Management Systems can only contribute to the organization when used correctly. Your employees need to know how to operate this wonderful piece of software before your organization will profit from it.

When people start using the IWMS, they will inevitable make mistakes which could proof to be extremely useful. One way of measuring their expectations about the system is to implement Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

Today’s teaching

Customer satisfaction, a business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Wikipedia

Customer Satisfaction Surveys can also be used for Integrated Workplace Management Systems and can hugely improve your IWMS implementation. In the IWMS arena your employees are the ‘customers’ of the Facility Management / Real Estate department.

5 Reasons for Implementing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

• Demonstrate commitment to listening to customers.

When you implement a customer satisfaction survey you demonstrate your commitment to listen your customers. You value their opinion and use that information to improve the quality of the IWMS as well as the service provided.

• Gain feedback from customers about products, services, and/or support

Every customer can potentially help you to improve your products, services and/or support. Collecting their feedback might provide you with insights you hadn’t thought of during the project. This includes information about the IWMS itself

• Improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Happy customers are returning customers. As stated before the success of an IWMS is depending on the usage of the system. If you know what problems your customers encounter, you are half way of solving them.

• Improve quality of service

Especially in a service delivery oriented environment your service quality needs to be reliable, consistent and of highly valued. The only way to improve these is to collect information of your customers. You need to know what service provider is living up to service performance standards of your organization. It allows you to take action accordingly.

• Obtain input on new products or services.

Customers can provide you with input on new products and services when given the opportunity to provide this feedback. This might also include new software modules you are implementing in your IWMS.

Today’s Task

Your task today is to:

1. create a customer satisfaction survey consisting of 8 Questions
2. send the survey to 10 Users
3. analyze the results

Although it is very important to have an entire Customer Satisfaction Program in place, today you will only focus on one specific domain. Topics you can choose from are:

• User Friendliness (Module, User Interface, etc.)
• Functionality (Space Management, Room Booking, etc.)

Remember that the survey is about improving your IWMS implementation so questions should be aimed to provide that information.

7 Customer Satisfaction Survey Tips

1. Relevant Questions – The questions need to be relevant for the respondent. Misplaced questions ensure misplaced answers
2. Confusing Words – Don’t use confusing words as they will reduce the quality of your survey. Be brief and clear.
3. Keep it short – Surveys impact the calendar and are generally disliked by customers. If you want valuable answers keep it short. Communicate how much time it will cost the employee.
4. Offer an incentive – People like to get incentives. A small incentive might be enough to participate
5. Clarify objectives – Describe in advance what you want to achieve. Measuring non existing objectives is hard.
6. Closed Lists – 5-point Likert scales provide an excellent way of measuring customer satisfaction.
7. Suggestions for improvement – Finally offer a suggestion for improvement for the respondent where he can provide his suggestion.

Respondents

You can send the customer satisfaction survey by email to your 10 respondents.

Analyzing

I recommend to use Microsoft Excel or similar to analyze the results. It allows you to create graphs easily which really look smart.

Customer Satisfaction Software

Although not relevant for today’s task you might want to consider Customer Satisfaction Software.

Collecting and analyzing customers’ answers is time consuming if you need to do this manually. Luckily some IWMS vendors provide Customer Satisfaction Surveys in their core application.

In addition to that there are some excellent alternatives available in the marketplace. These alternatives include:

• QuestionPro (www.questionpro.com)
• Surveytracker (http://www.surveytracker.com)
• ConfirmIT (http://www.confirmit.com)
• Zoomerang (http://www.zoomerang.com)

Good luck!

I would love to hear your experiences with your first customer satisfaction survey.