In this context, we’re interested in the perception of senior executives who pay the bills rather than the end users. Senior executives know the business objectives: a system that is unfriendly to use may be fine if it was cheap and delivered fast.
The customer survey can be approached from two perspectives: “quality” or “sales”.
The quality perspective prioritises obtaining accurate measurements results, which can be analysed and to identify process improvements. Implementing the process improvements should better customer satisfaction.
The quality perspective is exemplified in government contracts, where the customer satisfaction surveying may be conducted independently by the Office of Government Commerce. One major systems integrator recently switched responsibility for customer satisfaction measurement to its quality group to avoid their customer relationship managers influencing the scores upwards. With mixed results: some customers do not want to see an unfamiliar face; to them, introducing the quality group has just complicated their supplier relationships.
Organisations that adopt the sales perspective set out to influence the scores upwards. Here, the survey could never be completed by the customer offline and would not involve the quality group on the front line; it is completed during a discussion between an account manager (salesperson) and the customer.
The account manager goes in prepped on the successes of the contractor or IT department and understanding of what’s gone wrong. The account manager presents “what we’ve done for you”. The customer then provides feedback. The account manager tries to mitigate negative points. Following discussion the customer scores his or her satisfaction.
An in house IS department was getting feedback so negative it was almost vitriolic through a survey developed from the quality perspective. They redesigned the survey from the sales perspective. Customer satisfaction went up quickly and substantively. Here’s why:
- The conversation around the survey gave the customers a different perspective. They saw that supposed cost overruns were directly attributable to them introducing new scope. And actually, architected solutions did enable them to launch new products faster, as well as increasing the cost first time round.
- The conversation around the survey was rich: it explored themes and ideas. The qualitative feedback elicited drove innovative process improvements.
- Finally, because the conversation was a positive experience, the customer ceased regarding the survey as a meaningless tick box exercise and started to see IS’s genuine desire to improve. Doing the survey directly improved satisfaction.
