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Internal Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Service Delivery
In many organisations, the people who most often meet customers are
relatively junior members of staff. Often, a good
part of what the customer is buying is the quality of the service
delivered by these junior employees. You naturally put emphasis on
getting service delivery right, and expect these people to be smiling,
well groomed, knowledgeable, helpful, responsive to the customer's
needs, effective, quick and efficient.
Too often, when one of these people needs some help from someone
else within their organisation, the internal service they get falls
far short of the standard of external service they are expected to
deliver. This makes it hard for them to
keep on being as smiling, helpful, etc as you ask.
"I Haven't got any Customers"
People in jobs which don't involve meeting your 'end user' customers
will sometimes ask what customer satisfaction has to do with them.
They say they haven't got any customers. But of course they have.
Whatever function they are carrying out within the organisation, their
customers are all the people inside the organisation who
depend on that function being performed well to enable them to deliver
excellent service to end user customers. And the quality of the service
the support functions deliver to their internal customers naturally influences the
feelings and attitude of the front line staff who do meet end user
customers, so it contributes to the quality of service the organisation
delivers.
Service Quality Bargaining
It can be useful for a department to
measure its internal customers' satisfaction with the way it meets
their needs. We call this an Internal Customer Satisfaction survey.
But you can achieve more change if every area in the organisation
participates in the survey. Then you can get all the managers together
to share their results. They can negotiate with each other for commitments
about improvements they and their teams will make. This is probably
the most powerful way to use an internal customer satisfaction survey
to improve the quality of external customer service.
The phases of the project might be as follows:
- You / we
develop a suitable questionnaire
- Participating departments volunteer, or are designated
- Identify internal customers of each participating department *
- You / we choose from customer lists the individuals to be targeted
**
- You / we distribute the Internal Customer Satisfaction survey questionnaires and subsequent reminders
- We receive and analyse the responses
- You get reports on each participating department's performance
- You organise a management meeting or conference, and allocate
one or more sessions to negotiating internal service quality agreements.
We can facilitate these sessions for you if you wish
| * |
Ask departments to nominate their customers, or publish a list
of participating departments and invite their customers to volunteer to provide feedback. Or do both. |
| ** |
This may be necessary to limit the number of questionnaires that
will be sent to any one person, who may have been identified as
a customer of many different departments; and if the departments
have nominated the customers, to prevent departments nominating
only people they get on with. |
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