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Customer survey benchmark results - Variation is the enemy!
June 2011
In May of this year, Time Technology conducted a benchmark customer satisfaction survey as a feeder into the re‐energising of our Quality program. First of all, I would like to thank all of our customers that took the time to complete the survey.
The results were as follows:
I decided to publish the results to our customer, prospect and partner community, because they highlight the challenges that a growing business can face in maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. In fact, they bear out the very reason why it is important to have a quality program built into your processes, as opposed to overly relying on ones people to deliver customer satisfaction during challenging times. Time Technology has delivered year on year growth these past few years, and has just closed on our best year end results for 12 years. However, it would appear that this growth has had its impact on our overall levels of customer satisfaction.
Customers had the option to score us from 1 to 10 (1 being very dissatisfied and 10 being very satisfied). Although the average score was 7.28, below our target score of 8.25, there are some real positives to take from the results. More than 80% of our customers rated us as 6 or above, with more than 50% of these rating us at 8 or better. However, the variation in the customer experience is a big concern. Despite some customers being very satisfied, almost 20% have clearly experienced a less than satisfactory service (a score of 5 or less).
So, why did this variation happen? Clearly, our people understand what it takes to deliver a great service, otherwise a number of our customers would not have scored us so highly. However when growth occurs, processes and systems can become exposed. Under these circumstances, variation creeps in because one can only rely on ones people to cope with so much. Their ability to deliver a day in, day out, quality service, to every customer irrespective of size, gets severely challenged unless processes and systems are reviewed and improved in line with the developing business. This is what has happened to us in the past 12 months. We have had some people issues as well, which have now been addressed, but our focus around our processes and systems during this time of growth, has clearly been insufficient.
So, what are we doing about it? This month we started to invest in our Quality program, reenergizing our values of Customer Focus and Continual Improvement, and empowering our people to make changes to the processes within which they operate. I am confident that this is already leading to a reduction in the variation that our customers have experienced. We will be imbedding customer feedback mechanisms into our processes, so I hope to be able to confirm this improvement in the months to come.
VARIATION IS THE ENEMY!
For more information:
Call us on 01483 863000
E-mail us on sales@time-technology.co.uk
