Customer Feedback Audit

Organizations have relationships with a number of different stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, owners, partners. Successful companies recognize that retaining these relationships is key to organizational success. For example, employee retention is key to driving customer satisfaction, and customer retention is key to long term profitability. These companies also recognize that feedback from these stakeholders is invaluable to fostering optimal relationships.

Consider customer relationships. Internal company brainstorming is not sufficient to develop products and services that will retain — and gain — customers. Customer feedback is needed, and listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a vital component of a Customer Relationship Management program. Articulating the VOC helps you identify critical product/services features and measure current performance along Critical to Quality parameters. Thus, VOC is integral to a Six Sigma framework both for product/service design (DMADV) and for controlling and improving quality (DMAIC).

Similarly employee feedback is valuable to understand the impact of the organization’s practices to the retention of employees.

  But how good is your listening post to the world of your stakeholders?

  Are you evaluating your listening skills based upon those same internal views of what’s world class performance?

To benchmark your stakeholder feedback processes, Great Brook offers Voice of the Stakeholder Audit services (Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Employee, etc.). We will examine your feedback collection efforts and compare them to best practice, offering solid suggestions for improvement opportunities, both short term and long term. We expect that the benefits from the short term recommendations will more than cover the cost of the audit.

We will schedule an on-site visit to your facility to examine:

• Overall program goals and design
• Range of feedback sources used (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups)
• Degree of balance in the portfolio of feedback collection methods – breadth versus depth
• Active versus passive feedback collection
• Type of data collected
• Appropriateness of the feedback method(s) to its stated purpose
• Complaint and issue handling processes
• Root cause resolution processes for identified problems
• Communication of findings and their application to improvement programs
• Impact of the feedback collection upon those from whom the data are collected (after all, the feedback collection process affects the views of those stakeholders!)
• Ability of the program to meet the stated goals

An immediate summary of our assessment will be delivered at the end of the site visit to be followed by a comprehensive written report. At some appropriate time later, we will return and certify that your stakeholder feedback program has achieved good business practice.

Contact us to arrange for your Voice of the Stakeholder Audit. We’ll have some questions for you about your business, your operational processes and your current feedback program.