Customer satisfaction survey process

Efficient customer satisfaction management requires a long term vision and strategy, and a dedicated central Customer Satisfaction Manager who nurtures and protects the customer satisfaction process. For consistency and transparent survey processes it must be clear for the organization which manager is responsible for the customer satisfaction process. Because of that I recommend to assign an quality employee to the Customer Satisfaction Manager role.

To coordinate continuous improvement efforts all activities should be processed according a plan, do, check, act Deming cycle. It both emphasizes and demonstrates that the customer satisfaction program should start with careful planning, should result in effective action and last but not least should be measured and checked in a continuous and consistent PDCA cycle:

1. Plan (Central Customer Satisfaction Manager)
   • Establish the survey objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output.
   • Plan survey invitations, reminders and closure
2. Do (Central Customer Satisfaction Manager)
   • Implement and execute the survey processes
3. Check (Central Customer Satisfaction Manager)
   • Measure the processes and compare the results against the expected results to ascertain any differences.
   • Analyse survey response data
4. Act (Sales, Purchase and Logistic Manager)
   • Compile customer satisfaction reports
   • Analyse customer satisfaction reports
   • Select focal areas and determine their cause. Each will be part of either one or more of the PDCA steps.
   • Determine where to apply changes that will include improvement. When a pass through these four steps does not result in the need to improve, refine the scope to which PDCA is applied until there is a plan that involves improvement.

Reporting process

Reporting customer satisfaction must be a continuously, consistent, timely, accurate and reliable process. Therefore I advise to standardize the reporting structure and process flow. See figure 3 Customer Satisfaction Process

Figure 3. Customer Satisfaction Process.