9.1.2 Customer satisfaction Questionnaires

Unless you are committed to questionnaires, I wouldn't recommend them. Most customers don't like them. They don't present the information you're seeking. A simple phone call and 4 or 5 questions works much better, in my experience. Also, you will likely have 2 or 3 "customers" at each company you supply, so ensure you speak to all of them: Buyer, Material controller and user/quality.

 

The approach of sending out surveys isn’t my preferred approach - the work/cost to send out all those surveys doesn’t always translate into valuable return of data. However, if this is the approach taken by your company, sending them out might gain more of a response if done by the person/department that usually interacts with the client. But I’d suggest that the results be sent to an independent group, such as Q.A. For analysis and presentation.

Surveys can be emotional. People are more likely to voice their complaint than to voice a compliment.

And if the organization doesn’t action the results of the survey (I.e., improve), this may result in customers wondering if the organization cares about them.

 

Right! In fact, the standard doesn't require customer satisfaction measurement but an evaluation of the perception of whether requirements have been met (or something similar). Customer sat isn't really a measurement, despite being in the section 9 requirements. What we're interested in the a) the perception and b) an outcome of DOING THINGS RIGHT. It's really a symptom we're interested in as a means to ensure we're aligned to the customer. For example, how many of us have left a restaurant, been asked if everything was OK, answered yes, when we actually mean yes, but... And why don't we let them know? Because our perception is that we don't think they could do better! Or they wouldn't have done that if they understood how to do it right. Or a variation of these.

It is good, however well we're in touch with a customer, to periodically draw a "line in the dirt" and check, however.

 

In a previous life, we hosted Customer Experience Days - it was a one or two day "party" with customers on site. They could see our processes and, if planned properly, one lucky customer would see his/her product going down the line. This was a great way for our operators to see the people-side to what they were making, and it was an excellent way for our customers to gain insight into what efforts were needed to make their product. Networking win-win.

It was a tangible cost with intangible ROI, but we believed the benefits exceeded the cost.

In my current life, we do something similar...somewhat. Having transitioned from the world of steel over into community healthcare, once a year all leaders across the country go out into the community and do home visits with an assigned member of our front line staff. In the past, I've gone out with nurse who specialized in palliative care and a personal support worker who specialized in retirement cluster care (a building that offered independent living to retirees). This year, I'm going out with one of our therapists - actually doing my visits on this Friday and knowing the therapist's scope of work, I anticipate a 911 call or two, a couple of dementia cases, and even some cases of malnutrition bordering on starvation. For those of you who chat with me outside of QFO, I might be rather silent on Friday as I process everything from earlier in the day.

But the intent of our home visits is to bring a structured interview tool and spend some time with the Client and/or their family to understand what they like about us, what they wished we did differently, and if we are truly promoting our vision of "Hope and Happiness" with every visit made by one of our caregivers to their home.

We have also started call quality - this was added to my portfolio last year. Beyond the operational telecom information we have (average call time, number of calls handled, number of calls < 20 seconds, etc.), my team has established call quality criteria and we now monitor these calls. If we catch a high risk event and/or complaint, we have a process to escalate to the appropriate individual. It is not our job to enter it into the system - my over-capacity team can only do so much.

Future state will be to include one or two questions asked to the caller by an automated system at the end of the call.

The issue I have with the original post is the term "satisfaction." A customer may not be satisfied with the product/service, but still may have an excellent experience. For example, when a Client calls us and asks "Where is my nurse?", our agents have tools to de-escalate the Caller and troubleshoot/problem-solve. In some cases, we are short-staffed (e.g., lots of staff call in "sick" on Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday). While we try to take actions to address this (e.g., over-staff, on-call staff, etc.), there are times when some Clients will miss out on care. This obviously results in dissatisfied Clients. However, if properly handled, a Client may end the call knowing they don't have a visit today, but still feeling respected, engaged, and recognized (i.e., a positive experience).

I admit that I've simplified the scenario quite a bit, and I've left out the details of how we do much of this, but I find that it can be helpful to sometimes change our perspective on how we look at things. Replace "satisfaction" with "experience" and consider other ways now to measure that instead.