The best way for any company to improve itself is to listen to its clients and actively ask for their opinions and thoughts, both positive and negative. A few years have passed since the last customer satisfaction survey, so it was high time for a new survey to see how we have been doing, and what we can do better. The survey was conducted by Ahaa Vision, who have done similar inquiries for us in the past years, most recently in 2020. The responses to the survey were collected in March this year. We received responses from 63 % of the companies to whom the survey was sent, the response rate was a bit lower than in previous years. According to Ahaa Vision, there has been a similar decline in responses to other online surveys in recent years as well.
The Results
The overall “happiness” index has remained at the 80 % mark from 2020, and like before, 100 % of the customers that answered were generally satisfied with our operations. We were happy to see that close to 90 % of our clients’ were inclined to recommend our services as a supplier. Satisfaction in customer service scored well and clients were happy with our flexibility, reliability, and fluency in collaboration. Satisfaction as a supplier had increased from 2020 and our scores for keeping promises to our clients, reaction time, and seeing to their needs increased as well.
We also discovered some room for improvement. Customer satisfaction with production costs relative to quality had fallen by a few percent, while quality, reliability, and flexibility scored high among responses. One cause for this drop is undoubtedly the unpredictable state the world has been in the past years, which has affected material costs worldwide and forced us to raise our prices in response at the beginning of 2022. Regardless of the pricing pressure that we cannot really affect, we need to improve in all quality areas to keep the quality-price ratio at the level our customers need it to be. We found that the area where we need to improve most is our ability to communicate with clients in unpredictable and unexpected situations and share new information faster to ensure the security of supply and to keep our clients in the loop. This was an issue we were aware of before the survey and began tackling last autumn by beginning to share information and communicate more via newsletters and news on our website.
What Comes Next
We take all feedback from our clients seriously and are always looking to do better. Our goal is to be a fast, flexible and reliable supplier, and we were happy to see that the overall feedback from our clients showed that we have met that goal and our clients consider us a reliable supplier. Our next steps are to improve communication between us and our clients and the managing and informing of unexpected situations while keeping up with our goal of fast, flexible, and reliable production and the development of high-quality products.
We thank all who participated in the survey and shared their thoughts!
