How to assess Customer Satisfaction without using surveys

[GaryBC]

Hi guys

Surveys don't work (customer's simply don't do them), using complaints as a measure is a bit 'after the fact' (if they get to the point where they're complaining it's already gone too far), is there any practical way of assessing customer satisfaction in compliance with the standard?

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Ron Rompen]

Re: Customer satisfaction. How to assess?

This is always a difficult one. If you are fortunate, your customer will give you a scorecard every quarter or annually, but if they don't then you have to work at it a bit harder.

I agree that an emailed survey usually gets forgotten or deleted, however if you have a small enough customer base, you might consider doing a telephone survey with the appropriate people at your customer. Email them and ask for a telephone conference - it shouldn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes to complete. Once they agree, send them a list of the questions you are going to ask, so that they can have their responses prepared.

 

[bpillar]

Re: Customer satisfaction. How to assess?

Gary, personally I stop to use the questionnairs for customer satisfaction since years, due to the fact they dosen't work. What normally auditor and at the end also customer have a look is the customer scorecard where you have to get all evaluation elements green. What is not measureble for my point of view is the human contact you get with your customer, extremely important as well as the indicators on scorecards.

 

[Sean Kelley]

Re: Customer satisfaction. How to assess?

If you have salespeople they can always ask a few questions during thier visit as to how are we doing? Is there anything we can do better for you? Keep it simple and maybe less than formal. Sometimes you can feed the customer about things you know you do above and beyond any competitiors to make sure they remember those extras.

 

[Kronos147]

Re: Customer satisfaction. How to assess?

I worked for a company that had decent results sending out "survey monkey" surveys. Survey monkey is a website, and surveys are done online.

 

[Steve Prevette]

Some possibilities:

Could you phone call a few customers a month and just engage in a conversation, perhaps asking a few pointed questions?

Generally, most customers want things:
PERFECT
FREE
YESTERDAY.

Do you receive any customer complaints? Warranty returns? Defective returns? Do you do any internal checks prior to product reaching the customer?

Do you have data on your pricing vs competitors? How many times does a customer say its too expensive when you are negotiating a deal?

What is your cycle time from customer request to delivery? Do you meet customer's requested receipt dates? How does your cycle time compare to competitors?

FINALLY, a very important question:

How many customers come back to buy another product from you?

 

[Golfman25]

Re: Customer satisfaction. How to assess?

I worked for a company that had decent results sending out "survey monkey" surveys. Survey monkey is a website, and surveys are done online.

We have done this. It works better than the paper forms but still a very low pct. returned. It does allow you to hit multiple departments at a customer very easily. We cut it back to every few years.

Mainly we use customer scorecards, complaints/returns, and any comments we can gather. Good luck.

 

[JLyt207]

Some possibilities:
<clip>
How many customers come back to buy another product from you?

We just started using a metric similar to this as one of the ways to gauge satisfaction for those customers that don't provide a scorecard. We don't have a proprietary product so any order represent a free choice by the customer. So we started tracking their order behavior as a measure of satisfaction. In general it shows that the number of orders and their dollar volume have increased over the years.

 

[normzone]

Having discarded an ineffective survey or two, I now collect feedback from Sales personnel regarding any customer squawking, and any thank-yous or compliments we get from customers. This plus generating CARs for any RMA caused by a failure of our internal processes meets the requirement of 9001:2008.

 

[DannyK]

You could measure your On time delivery and return rate to the customer.

You could maintain a customer feedback log and have customer service ask the client if they have any feedback from the last order shipped and complete the log.