A few months ago, Paton Press published a book of mine entitled "Customer Satisfaction: Tools, Techniques, and Formulas for Success." The book details a range of tools for gauging customer perceptions, from the simple to the very complex. Specific examples are provided along with instructions on how to use, and how NOT to use, each tool. Topics include call reports, field reports, complaint systems, comment cards, and quantitative customer surveys. The book is concise, and no-nonsense. If anyone is looking for some methods for getting their arms around the what customers really think, this would be a good resource.
If anyone gets the book, I'll send them electronic copies of all the tools and examples that are shown. I'd also love to hear feedback of any sort on the book.
Talk to you later,
Craig
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Craig Cochran
Center for International Standards & Quality
Georgia Institute of Technology craig.cochran@edi.gatech.edu
I have purchased a copy of your book and am currently on Chapter 4 Comment Cards. The measurement of customer satisfaction is an issue that we have really struggled with as the President of the organization does not want to use surveys and I am trying to find a way to minimize the need for such documents. I will be using some of the information in your book to present ideas to the other team members and maybe get the creative juices flowing.
Thanks for getting the book! Hopefully it will be helpful. I don't blame your President for not wanting to use traditional quantitative surveys. They're expensive, complicated, and easy to screw up. I would try to utilize existing customer interactions for collecting customer perceptions as much as possible. The call report and field report tools, both described in the book, are especially easy and effective. Give them a shot. I've attached some example call report and field report tools for anyone who's interested. Of course, the book gives explicit and user-friendly instructions for using a whole range of customer satisfaction tools, so it's a pretty decent resource... ;-)
Good luck, and let me know if I can assist with anything. Thanks again.
Craig
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Craig Cochran
Center for International Standards & Quality
Georgia Institute of Technology craig.cochran@edi.gatech.edu
I do belive that the book is going to be very useful for our organization. While I have only been with the organization for a short time, I have noticed that there is a lot of interaction with our customers at various levels of the organization. The call report and/or the field report shown in our book will probably be our best data gathering tools.
If you are an organization that is struggling with the implementation of customer satisfaction measurements, I would highly recommed the purchase and use of "Customer Satisfaction Tools, Techniques, and Formulas for Success". I have just finished reading the book and have begun to circulate some of the tools throughout our organization. I am acutally getting feedback and suggestions on how to modify these tools to work for our organization. This is a big step for us as I have been trying to get everyone on the same page for quite some time with little success. Thanks for a great book Craig. This could be just what we need to get us focused on customer feedback.
Our management group will be meeting in a couple of weeks to look at the various tools. I will let you guys know which one we find most beneficial to our organization.
Craig Cochran
Center for International Standards & Quality
Georgia Institute of Technology craig.cochran@edi.gatech.edu
Good luck, and let me know if I can assist with anything. Thanks again.
Hi, Craig
Though I have not yet seen the call report and field report tools you attached, I am interested to know about measuring customer satisfaction (CS) of the students and other stake holoders in colleges, especially engineering colleges. Are these tools and examples effective? Also how do we go about measuring the CS? please advise
thareja
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This question is open to all cover's too to respond to
Measuring customer satisfaction in colleges and universities is very challenging. The reason is that there are so many different customers involved: the students, their parents, the community, businesses that hire graduates, donors, alumni, legislators, taxpayers, and even sports fans. The list keeps on going. So just trying to figure out which customers you really need to focus on can be a bit of a trick. Personally, I believe the most immediate and most obvious customers of colleges and universities are the students themselves. It makes sense to start with this customer when gauging perceptions.
The next big challenge is the time horizon for gauging satisfaction. Does it make sense to capture perceptions right after the education experience? Or does it make more sense to capture perceptions sometime later, after the students have had a chance to apply to the knowledge and skills in a practical setting? Obviously both are important. We ask all our students to complete a very short survey after each of our courses. The results of this survey primarily reflect on the instructor, the materials presented, and the enjoyability of the experience. It's impossible for the students to say very much about application at this point. We have debated methods for following-up on students 2-6 months after the course, to gauge their satisfaction in the usefulness of the concepts in their work. The problem is that we don't have the resources to conduct a meaningful follow-up, so we just rely on the survey that is completed at the end of the course. Perfect? No, far from it. We've still learned a lot about what people like and don't like about our courses, though. We chart the information, provide feedback to instructors, and incorporate the customer satisfaction data into our course designs and re-designs.
I've attached the short survey we use at our courses. It includes 6 satisfaction variables, plus a couple of open-ended questions ("what did you like best," "what did you like least"). I've also attached a purely open-ended course evaluation that lets the students provide whatever feedback they care to.
Good luck. Let me know if I can assist further. Of course, my book might also provide some insights. ;-)
Craig
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Craig Cochran
Center for International Standards & Quality
Georgia Institute of Technology craig.cochran@edi.gatech.edu
Customer satisfaction book
Review of Customer Satisfaction Book
measuring customer satisfaction
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