How Do I Plan a Customer Satisfaction Project?

Planning a customer satisfaction project involves several steps that can be followed to ensure success. Whether you are completing the project as a student researcher or intern or as a professional within a business, your customer satisfaction project should be outlined precisely before being implemented. In this way, the specifics can be carefully planned, from the particulars of customer satisfaction that are being measured and the means of measuring to the target customer base — whether that be all customers or a representative sample — and assessment methods. The ultimate goal of a customer satisfaction project should be to measure one or more aspects of the satisfaction customers feel so the information can be used in promoting and improving the business.

The specifics to be measured should be decided clearly before your customer satisfaction project is to begin. Some projects may have to do with certain details of a business, such as whether fast-food customers are content with the speed of delivery of food at the drive-through window. Other projects may be oriented toward finding out if customers are satisfied with a business overall. Having in mind a clear goal for what should be measured before beginning a project like this will ensure that it runs more smoothly, especially if you decide on the goals for the project through consultation with workers and managers alike.

Once your goals have been chosen, you may want to decide how to measure or obtain information about customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction projects might be organized by asking one or more specific questions that customers can answer using a number scale indicating a range from total satisfaction to total dissatisfaction. Questions that are open-ended and require customers to come up with their own answers also may be used. When to give surveys to customers, such as at the end of every visit, and how to give them the surveys or questions, such as in person, by email or by postal mail, also is a consideration. Your project may focus on getting opinions from all customers for a small business or from a representative sample of customers for a large business.

The final step in planning your customer satisfaction project involves figuring out how to assess and analyze the data that have been collected. Information about customer satisfaction might be written about in a report using narratives, charts and graphs, or it may be compiled and presented in an electronic slideshow format. The data that has been collected about customer satisfaction should then be used in some manner, whether it will contribute to future advertising campaigns for the company or to improve customer service.