CHAPTER 21
Customer Survey

Successful project managers focus on the project management Triple Constraint: Scope, Schedule, and Cost (Figure 21-1). Maintenance managers will also focus on these but will expand their focus to include customer satisfaction as a key metric of the maintenance team’s success. Evaluating customer satisfaction is an important part of maintaining service delivery quality.

Customer satisfaction is not easy to manage. Customer satisfaction can drop in an instant over one issue, but it is not as easy to bring back up. It is more important to manage customer satisfaction when you deliver a service and not a product. Managing customer satisfaction is addressed in Chapter 12, “Customer Care.”

This chapter, “Customer Survey,” focuses on surveying customer satisfaction. We will first present a customer survey form and discuss how to analyze the results. Then we will present an effective way to engage customers in completing the survey, including how to set up the meeting for maximum success.

Figure 21-1: Triple Constraint

Obtaining customer survey information should be a part of the work of every IT team. Each IT group needs input from the customer. Multiple surveys having a similar look and feel will project a helpful image for the IT department, which can enhance customer perceptions of the quality of the services delivered. If each team in your IT department does not currently conduct customer surveys, you should at least perform them for your own team.

Survey Content

The Customer Survey Form should be designed with care and contain a limited number of simple questions. The experience for the customer should not be burdensome, so the survey should be designed to easily capture customer feedback. The survey should cover only what is important to the customer.

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) can help you to generate a list of the services you are contracted to deliver and a list of systems. These lists could be helpful, because while you may be thinking about all the subsystems that your team maintains, the customer might not recognize their names on a survey. Going back to the SLA will help ground the survey in terminology that the customer is already used to seeing. Figure 21-2 provides a sample customer survey.

In the Systems section, list the systems that the customer will recognize. Explain that the feedback should be about how the systems themselves run, whether they are meeting business value expectations, and so forth.

Next, in the Services section, list the high-level services that your team delivers to the customer. Some examples of services are listed in the sample survey.

In the Other section, the survey asks if the customer wants to highlight anyone’s performance, and it is worded to include either negative or positive performance. Responses in this section will provide you with one last opportunity to identify a problem with a person or will supply you with names of team members you can recognize for their outstanding contributions.

Figure 21-2: Customer Survey

Rating 1:Does Not Meet Expectations, 2:Meets Expectations, 3:Exceeds Expectations

The survey form is designed to separate the systems from the services. The intent is to avoid confusing the customer. For example, the legacy systems may need to be replaced, and the business owner and IT might agree that there is no budget to perform the replacement and that replacement of the system will have to wait. But their agreement about waiting to replace the system may not stop the customer from feeling frustrated or from reflecting that frustration in the survey. By separating the systems and the service, we should see the system receive a poor rating and the service on that system receive a rating that is not tainted by the customer’s disappointment with the system.

The survey can be created as a simple document, or you can use the latest technology, such as a web survey tool. Any approach should be valid as long as the customer can easily use the technology to take the survey.

Who Receives the Survey

Survey recipients should be appropriately high-level people such as department directors. They can, in turn, solicit their subordinates’ opinions, and they are in a good position to put those opinions into an appropriate context.

Survey Use for Best Impact

Customer satisfaction surveys can be used to support various objectives. You can use them as a one-way communication from the customer; you may be tempted to just send the survey (or a link to the web survey tool) to the appropriate people via e-mail and wait to receive their responses. Another approach, and the one we recommend, is to use the customer satisfaction survey as another opportunity to build and improve your relationships with your customers.

An effective way to use this opportunity is to schedule a quarterly face-to-face meeting with each customer to review the feedback. To expedite the meeting, e-mail the form to customers ahead of time. The dialog during the meeting is invaluable. What they say will provide more information on potential process improvement areas than the survey itself can ever provide. The fact that you are there listening to your customers will further demonstrate your commitment to serving them.

To help customers remember what service you provided over the past period, you can include a summary of work from the Work Tracking Tool. Include this information when the survey form is sent. The times that go well can easily be forgotten. This summary can speak volumes.

Items to investigate may be identified at the meeting. It is vital to promptly follow up on any items the customer may have raised. This will demonstrate your commitment to the customer’s business.

The Customer Survey Form should not change substantially for each quarter. This will allow you to analyze the results over time to see if satisfaction is increasing or decreasing and where improvement opportunities exist.

Appropriately prepare yourself for the feedback. You never know when you will be surprised by negative feedback. Don’t be defensive. Always look at feedback as an opportunity to improve. Remember, the customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer.