Satisfaction Guaranteed

The delivery of facilities management services is centred on people — the customers receiving FM services. Customer performance measurement is the process of capturing, measuring and improving the perception of customers. It is a vital component within an FM department’s overall performance measurement framework. For example, the BIFM issued a report in 2004 entitled Rethinking Facilities Management: Accelerating change through best practice, where “promoting customer satisfaction” was regarded as one of the top five issues facing the sector then and in the following 5-10 years.

That report is now seven years old. Based on its findings, promoting customer performance measurement should be an essential role of FM departments.

Service improvement research is the field that attempts to manage and co-ordinate the views and perceptions of the various services received from the tenants of a given housing provider. Tenant satisfaction forms a major component of the performance measurement framework of social landlords, for example, largely influenced by the need to provide annual statutory returns on such data.

It is not surprising, therefore, that considerable attention is given each year to how this process is rolled out, in order to ensure that effective, well- co-ordinated survey research is undertaken that accurately reflects the overall tenant base.

A large amount of research has been done on how FM departments capture and manage customer satisfaction data in order to effectively contribute to the continuous improvement of their service delivery. Large-scale research projects have been undertaken; and, at first glance, the landlord-tenant relationship in the FM sector shares some of the features of that in the social housing sector.

According to the literature in this area — and based on the input of various industry representatives — in terms of how to measure customer satisfaction, a general consensus is the common use of the ‘annual customer satisfaction survey’.

While there are some very good customer surveys conducted, there are many bad ones. Problems arise when only one method is used to collect data and the survey used falls into the latter category. At root, to improve the quality of the conclusions drawn from the data, researchers need to use customer perception more intelligently.

We live in an information age where organisations measure performance in order to prove their business worth. It is important to be able to continually improve and add value in every aspect of a business.

By seeking to improve the processes involved in capturing and measuring customer satisfaction data, FM departments can, in turn, enhance their service provision. It is to this end that a list of recommendations is proposed for FM departments to consider, in order to deliver a more robust customer performance measurement framework.

Here are several important tips for setting up a successful customer satisfaction survey:

1. Ensure staff and client engagement — employees who are positively engaged have higher levels of productivity and profitability, better safety and attendance records, and higher levels of retention. Most importantly for FM, they are more effective with customers through increased engagement with the way they liaise with them regarding the completion of customer satisfaction data, which, in turn, will drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.
2. Use a mixed data collection strategy — move away from a sole focus on what the end results say. In other words, before undertaking a standard customer satisfaction survey, consider qualitative mechanisms that can enhance the process. This can be achieved through interviewing staff and clients on how they feel about the current methods of providing feedback, as well as any other concerns they have with the services provided. This effectively complements the otherwise crude statistics achieved from survey data.
3. Ensure strategic questioning — survey questionnaires are often too abstract, do not help answer organisational objectives and consequently hinder the respondent from providing an accurate answer. In turn, this distorts the logic of the ‘you said, we did’ approach. Questions should be relevant to what the department is trying to achieve and pertinent to the service being delivered.
4. Implement benchmarking standards — having a formal benchmarking system that maps customer satisfaction within your department formalises the process. Keep questions consistent so that you can assess your entire client base, rather than small pockets in isolation. Also, use key filter questions within your questionnaire to analyse across clients, such as analysing by sector, size, service or geography. Moreover, if this can be mapped against external benchmarking data, it implies professionalism and dedication that the organisation is trying to emulate and hopefully achieve superiority against the industry best-in-class.
5. Allocate sufficient budget — outsourcing your performance measurement function to a specialist research department, or investing in a dedicated research team, can pay dividends to the quality of data received and the quality of participation from both staff and employees. It is not only consultants who can offer this service, but academic institutions too.
6. Recruit a dedicated performance/staff champion at board room level — too often, the process of gaining customer satisfaction data is undertaken at an operational level with little strategic input. Dedicated performance champions take your performance measurement framework away from being an operational function to a key agenda item at board-room level. A top-down approach to measuring customer satisfaction is essential.

In summary, if FM providers can master the process of measuring customer satisfaction and it is led from the top down, then it will inevitably contribute to the achievement of more meaningful, accurate and often improved customer satisfaction results.