We decided to create a customer satisfaction survey and send it to all our customers. The goal of this post is to share the story about our journey – why we decided to do that, and how we did it…

One of our core values is service. We are a service provider, so it’s kinda makes sense. But the meaning of having it as a core value goes much deeper than just being a service provider. We strive to give the best service experience to everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean it. Yes, we want to give our customers the best service. But not just to our customers. We want to give each other great service. We want to serve our community better, our neighborhood, our world…

But I would like to concentrate on our customers in this post. We have been serving our customers for the past 10 years, and we have always tried to learn and improve our service. The relationships with our customers have always been personal. So we used to ask our customers how satisfied they are with our service and what we can do to improve. We will continue to do that, but we feel that it’s not enough.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

So we started to look for a better way to gather valuable feedback from our customers. We decided to create a customer satisfaction survey and send it to all our customers. In order to do that, we did some research and learned how other companies do that. We picked what we felt is right for us, and after some back and forth, we are proud to present our first customer satisfaction survey.

The goal of this survey is to learn from our customers how satisfied they are with our services, and how they see us as a company. We plan to run the survey every 6 months, and we are going to set goals for ourselves to improve from one survey to another. In order to do that, we are going to calculate a customer satisfaction score. We will calculate the score for each customer and also the average score for all customers. So the goal is to improve the score from one survey to the next.

The Survey

We wanted to gather as much information as possible, but at the same time we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. So we ended up with 30 questions divided into 4 categories: our services, our team, our company and overall satisfaction.

Another decision we had to make is the number of steps customers can choose from when we ask them to rate something. For example, if we ask them to rate the quality of our services, should we give them a scale of 1 to 10, or maybe 1 to 5, or something else?

First, we decided to use an even number of steps, so that for every question, the person taking the survey will have to make a choice. Otherwise, if there is an odd number of steps, then in many cases people just mark the middle one (e.g. 3 for a scale of 1 to 5). This way they don’t really share any feedback with us.

The next decision we had to take is how many steps? 4, 6, 10? We did some testing, and eventually we decided to go with 6. So when we ask customers to rate the quality of our services, for example, the numbers should represent the following opinions, more or less:

1 – Awful!

2 – Very poor quality

3 – Poor quality

4 – Good quality

5 – Very good quality

6 – Awesome!

The Questions

The first question we ask is: “How would you rate the services that you receive from Madeira Data Solutions?”. We then ask our customers to rate the services across 5 dimensions: quality, uniqueness, price, value for money and overall satisfaction.

Here is a screenshot to give you a taste of how it looks like:

We then ask the customer to identify the data professional from our team who is working with them. Sometimes multiple data professionals are working for the same customer, so this can be tricky. We decided to keep it simple, so we ask to identify the leading data professional, and then provide feedback about that person. We think that by collecting data from all customers, we will have enough information regarding each one of our team members, and we will also be able to measure our entire team as a whole.

Once the customer identifies the leading data professional, we give them a list of attributes, and we ask how well each one of the attributes describes the data professional. The scale is still 1-6, ranging between “Not at All” and “Very Much”. The attributes are:

• Fun to Be With
• Professional
• Service Oriented
• Strives to Improve as a Human Being and as a Data Professional
• Transparency and Knowledge Sharing
• Treats Any Person with Respect
• Willing to Help

Next, we want to know how our customers perceive our company. We have a unique spirit that we are very proud of. This spirit is derived from our 10 core values. We want to know if our customers recognize these values in our unique spirit. So we ask: “How well does each of the following values describe the spirit of Madeira Data Solutions?”

• Differentiation
• Equality and Respect
• Family
• Fun
• Life Balance
• Personal and Professional Advancement
• Professionalism
• Service Oriented
• Transparency and Knowledge Sharing
• Willing to Help

The last part of the survey contains 3 simple but very important questions. The goal of these questions is to learn about the overall satisfaction of the customer. Here they are:

• How well do you feel we understand your needs?
• How likely are you to recommend our services and solutions to a friend or colleague?
• Overall, how satisfied are you with Madeira Data Solutions?

Transparency

As you can see, one of our core values is transparency. We are trying to be as transparent as we can with our customers, with our community, and with one another. This is true for this customer satisfaction survey too, of course.

In the next couple of weeks we are going to send the survey to all our customers, collect the data, analyze it, calculate the scores, and produce action items for us to improve. And we are going to share everything. Well, we are not going to share customer names, in order to honor their privacy, of course. But we will share the statistical results and the calculated scores. I will soon write another post with the results of the survey, so stay tuned…

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