Survey Your In-plant's Customers
During a webinar last week by PagePath ("5 Steps to Avoid University In-plant Outsourcing"), Adam Witek urged managers to be proactive about showing their value to upper management. One way to do this, he said, is to compile data collected through customer surveys. But once you get the results, don't just read them and stash them away; make sure you act on the results and make appropriate changes to address them.
Planning a survey, though, can be intimidating. As Consultant Ray Chambers pointed out in an article in the IPG archives, "survey designers often start with one objective and end up with something completely different." He advised managers to "keep it simple."
In his article, Chambers offered some great tips to help you craft a useful customer satisfaction survey that will tell you where you stand and help identify areas needing improvement. He outlined seven dimensions that can define customer satisfaction: Timeliness, Responsiveness, Convenience, Location, Availability, Overall Quality and Overall Satisfaction.
"By crafting one or two questions around each of these dimensions, a researcher can get a pretty good idea of the level of satisfaction of the folks being queried," Chambers noted. He goes on to give sample survey questions.