Customer Satisfaction

Now this would be one cool report to have. I have not seen one in existence either.

My measure would be the number the end product performance during the warranty period; usually 30 days or in Live-mode. The number of defects /breakdown in functionality or performance latency will determine the level of customer satisfaction which is inversely proportionate; lesser defects leads to higher customer satisfaction. (assuming the projects is delivered within the constraints).

Customer satisfaction depend on your mutual understanding with customer. Moreover there is need to execute the project with proper Planning and to complete it before end time.

Here are two actions for assessing customer satisfaction:

During project meetings with participants, contributors, stakeholders and users, their input for opening comments is requested at the start of the meeting and again individually by name and the end of the meeting for topics and concerns. For attendees that are shy on speaking up, follow up conversations and phone calls ensure that they can provide unpressured feedback. This provides new topics for elaboration and discussion at subsequent meetings.

Well in advance of scheduled quality checks on deliverables, stakeholders and users are contacted to discuss and assess progress, review the project goals and objective, and to uncover any quality expectations not adequately addressed. This provides a benchmark to the project team to continue progress or to implement corrective action.

The basic question to address is How to ensure customer Satisfaction at the end of project? Despite project delivery within budget and time, still customer may not be satisfied. This dissatisfaction may be because of Scope or the way solution is designed or usability or any other factor.

My take on this is that no end result is an event in itself. It is a resultant function of lot of past inputs that cannot be ignored while understand what happened and how we could have had a better ending?

That is why you have regular quality (& process) audits, feedback mechanisms, follow up meetings, elaboration sessions, prototype sessions, UAT, sign-offs, Continuous C-SAT survey, - all on regular basis, for continual concurrence and so that there are no end surprises.

Involving the customer during documenting of lessons learned for 'future' projects is a good approach, but that is for FUTURE. Yes, it is required. Corrective Action. The given scenario in the question is on how to ensure satisfaction with the overall project, performance, and communication.. what strategy to follow to ensure this happens, for "this" project. And to ensure that, we need to have regular proactive actions like those listed in the previous para, which answer the 'How' part of the story.

My strategy is to keep them involved and engaged throughout the project from the very beginning through to implementation and measuring success.

We usually assess the Customer Satisfaction continuously all along the different phases of the project or program. There are periodic sponsors/management meetings and Lessons Learned sessions at the end of the key steps of the project. We have implemented a "two-in-a-box" approach between our project team and the Customer teams where Project Managers and Team Leaders must meet during scheduled project meetings to discuss and agree about the project status including a Customer Satisfaction status. By this way all formal Project Status Reports show a weekly or monthly evaluation of the Customer Satisfaction. With this approach the Customer Satisfaction is checked periodically at different levels of the Project Governance (Executive, Management, Project). Trends can be then easily discussed and recovery action plans can be executed if necessary as soon as any dissatisfaction occurs.

I usually include my client in the lessons learned. That's a good place to see if the client is truly satisfied with the results.

My suggestion is do the lessons learned with just the project team first, then do one with the client.