Processing Customer Feedback Data

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly and corrective actions put in place.  The alterations made to the service delivery activities to more closely align them to the customer’s requirements are then communicated to the customer base to complete the process.

Since we are a remote services provider, our customers’ businesses range the spectrum from heavy industry to high technology.   We understand that each of our customers has a unique set of value drivers upon which they evaluate the quality of services we provide to them.  We are also aware that our customer’s service delivery expectations are constantly affected by changing business and economic drivers.  The types of services we provide must be tuned and tweaked continuously to ensure that we meet these fluid service delivery expectations.

Once you have collected your own set of customer evaluations, you need to review the results and tally them to identify any common issues that are occurring. Epi Torres, my Remote DBA Experts’ co-blogger, has already identified the key evaluation criteria that are used to evaluate services providers: Timeliness, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Responsiveness, Quality and Integrity. You can categorize your own customer responses according to the key evaluation criteria we have identified or create your own. Once you create the categories, your next step is to perform a thorough analysis of the responses in each of the them.  If you identified a common theme of recommendations, your next step is to rank them in order of importance to your customers.

As you evaluate the categorized responses, you will need to take external influences into consideration that may be affecting your ability to provide high-quality support (inadequate staffing levels, time consuming projects, technical limitations of the environment). One of the key benefits of these documented responses is that this information can be passed up the management chain for further analysis and recommendations. For example, if you have too few DBAs and too many work requests, this additional documentation will notify your management team that the quality of work is suffering.  If additions to staff are hard to come by due to economic conditions, you have at least made both your management team and customer base the importance of setting realistic deadlines and prioritizing workloads.

Action plans to improve in weak areas are created during the evaluation process. Once agreed upon, the internal procedural and process changes can be implemented to tune and tweak the service delivery mechanisms.  A formal document that describes the issues identified and provides details on the changes that will take place to address them can then be distributed to the customers involved in the evaluation and the DBA team’s management chain.

It is important to also address specific customer recommendations that were contained in the customer responses.  Even though a specific issue was not identified as a common theme that exists across the entire customer base, they must still be addressed to ensure that individual customer’s happiness.  Is the customer’s expectation realistic within the confines of the external influences?  If it is, the recommendation needs to be addressed.

Follow-up meetings, designed to ensure that the service delivery changes are having the desired outcome, should be scheduled a few weeks after the action items document is distributed. The meetings should be held with the customers that participated in the original review process.  The discussion will address recommendations that were identified to be common amongst the entire customer base as well as the individual recommendations identified by that particular customer.

The process then becomes iterative in its nature. We have developed our own cyclical customer feedback process here at Remote DBA Experts.  We feel so strongly about this iterative approach to customer feedback that we have created a standardized customer feedback strategy called “The Customer Feedback Engine.” We have established multiple communication flows to ensure that we receive feedback from all of the folks that we support including management, DBAs, developers and end-users. We continuously approach our customers to gather feedback to improve our services.   We also look for new, innovative ways to gather customer feedback, process it, improve our approach to service delivery and then communicate those improvements to our customers.

You need to know what your customers are expecting from you.  You also need to know how they feel about the quality of support that you are currently providing. Without that information you will never be sure if you are providing the highest level of quality support possible.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery