Project performance measurement to keep you focused on managing and meeting your customers expectations

Managing Customer Expectations

Ask the customer what they expect of you to start with so you can understand their issues better. This way the whole team can work together to meet the customers needs. Any hidden agendas the customer can be uncovered at this point, rather then at the end of the project or contract when its all too late!

The output of this process then needs to be recorded and communicated to the whole team so that it is clear to everyone what they need to do to make the project or contract successful. We call this the 'Guidance Sheet'.

Measuring Your Performance

Ask the customer to score what they expect from you and what they perceive your performance to be, so that the team can identify where its performance is falling short. By focusing on the performance gap between the two it removes the arbitrariness of different scoring scales, and gives you an agenda for closing the biggest gaps and most important gaps first.

This is all done using our web-enabled measurement service 'KPI-online'.

Managing Customer Issues

Any issues raised by the customer then need to be logged and resolved by the team. By allocating the action to a specific person, they have a responsibility for making sure it is dealt with effectively by a specific date. This ensures the customer’s issue is taken on board and is dealt with promptly.

Closing the loop by going back to the Customer

Many companies focus to much on measuring customer service, but not enough time on resolving any issues and communicating these back to the customer. Would you give up your valuable time to complete another questionnaire if you did not receive any feedback, or notice any improvements from the valuable insights you gave last time.

We believe this part of the process is very important as it show the customer that you have taken their feedback seriously and made their lives easier by improving your service.

Sharing Best Practice

Finally ensure that any actions are signed off and recorded as best practice so that others in the company can benefit from the lessons learned. This way you can develop a knowledge bank of ‘service excellence’ which will help you keep ahead of the competition.

The last three steps can all be managed by what we call the 'Performance Improvement Note' (PIN) system.