Customer needs assessment and satisfaction surveys

Finding out what the needs of your customers are, and determining their degree of satisfaction wiith the services you provide, are both difficult, and many councils fail to do them effectively. They make assumptions about what their customers want without checking, and sometimes are not even sure about who their customers are.

Finding out about customer needs is fundamentally about listening to what individuals, communities and businesses have to say - using well-desgned, open survey techniques to determine them. Too often, councils arrive at the wrong answers through asking closed questions, or the wrong ones. Councils that conclude that the telephone is the customers' preferred channel often have not asked the right question, have not asked it in the right way, or simply do not offer any practical alternatives - their website may be poor, and their reception areas poorly designed and unwelcoming.

Socitm Consulting can help with determining customer needs through well designed and executed survey methods, and also has survey tools for determining customer satisfaction with the services provided.

Examples of projects undertaken include: