Mango Compliance Conversations: How Often Should We Measure Customer Satisfaction

How Often Should We Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Gary, QSM Group, Australia

Ideally, the best time to measure customer satisfaction is when the experience is fresh in your customer’s minds.

The frequency with which you conduct customer satisfaction surveys depends on the frequency with which you interact with your customers.

However, you need to bear in mind that if your customers are constantly being bombarded with surveys from you, there is the real risk you will upset at least a few of them.

Mark, Business Basics, Australia

Constantly. Always. Any time you have an engagement with a customer or a client, it’s an opportunity to learn and say,

• How are we doing?
• What can we do better?
• What are we doing that makes you want to look somewhere else?

If you wait to do this once a year, it’s too late, half the customers who you’ve upset, who have those great big red lights, they’ve probably already gone somewhere else.

Do it constantly, every time you talk to a customer.

John, Many Caps, New Zealand

Customer satisfaction should be measured all the time. Every interaction with the customer, you should be coming away with a gauge of:

• How satisfied are they?
• How happy are they with you?
  • as a company
  • as a supplier

Michael, Momentum Safety and Ergonomics, Australia

It will depend a bit on the group.

With regards to purchasers of our product or service, I think that probably should be as regular as we can make it and we should try and have a process in place whereby each new consumer has the opportunity.

Otherwise, I think we should be trying to look at random samples, via phone calls. Or things like employee surveys, which are often sent out annually just to get a bit of a vibe for how things are going there, but you wouldn’t want to do it too much more often than that.

Nicholas, SRM, South Africa

Well for us, every single time we engage with our customers when we communicate with them when we’re meeting face to face or on the phone. We should be able to gauge customer satisfaction then, rather than these in-situ customer satisfaction surveys.

We’ll be able to put that information into our CRM and have an understanding of where the customer is at because trust me, the customer is going to tell you when they’re not happy.

Also, if you get to engage with them face to face, and they haven’t seen you, they’ll be able to give you that update.

So every single time you interact with a customer, you should be able to gauge their satisfaction and feed that back into the business.

Andrew, IRM Systems, Australia

In my view at any opportunity, we get.

For any of those customer meetings we have, let’s bring some of that information back to the quality team, so they know what customers are saying.

Apart from that, once we’ve delivered our service or our project, would be a great time to try and solicit some feedback.

If it’s a large project that’s going over many years, obviously, we want some customer consultation at steps before that as well. Because if there’s anything they’re concerned about, we want to address it straight away.

Chris, FQM, United Kingdom

This is actually a very difficult question because every organisation can be a little bit different.

If the nature of the business that we do requires us to regularly get feedback and satisfaction information from our customers, then obviously, we want to do that often.

But we also want to think about in terms of measurement of satisfaction, not necessarily dealing directly with the customer, and asking those specific questions:

• Are you satisfied?
• Can you give me feedback?
• Can you answer these 10 questions?

But more about how the interaction is.

Can we create metrics that allow us to:

• Look at our repeat business,
• Look at our spend level with customers,
• Look at our late deliveries,
• Look at our warranties,
• Our support requirements,
• Our recalls
• The number of times that there has had to be some interaction with a customer that wouldn’t normally occur?

We can build a metrics program, which would be specific for our business.

One of the reasons for thinking about building this metric program is simply to allow us to try and improve.

If we’re simply doing it as a numbers game, it’s not going to do anything for us, it’s certainly not going to change our customer satisfaction.

So think about the output, the end game.

What do we want to do with this customer satisfaction data?

And importantly, how are we going to spread that through the organisation to drive improvement?

Sean, Kaizen Consulting, New Zealand

It obviously depends on the type of relationship that you’ve got and the product or service that you provide to the client.

The frequency of it should be determined by the company itself, but it should be frequent enough for you to identify those shortfalls or shortcomings early enough to be able to rectify them.

Takeaways

1. Every time you engage with a customer is an opportunity to see how you are doing
2. The frequency should be often enough to identify and rectify any shortcomings in a timely manner.
3. Look at building a metrics program specific to your business.