Introduction
Our customer satisfaction survey is a crucial part of CompanyNet’s continuous improvement, so I thank our customers deeply for taking the time to respond. It is a privilege to receive your feedback.
We want to be in tune with you and responsive to your needs in every business engagement. We invest heavily in the continuous improvement journey. With your help, we are signposting our successes, identifying our shortcomings, and making appropriate adjustments more accurately and effectively.
We review and act on every survey response, while also looking at trends and patterns emerging from the data across all our customers and use this data to inform improvements and changes as necessary.
In keeping with CompanyNet’s commitment to transparency and openness, we’ve chosen to start sharing survey feedback publicly with all our customers, and explain any changes we’ve made as a result.
I hope you find this a useful insight into how we are continuing to improve our service.
Andy Hamilton
CEO, CompanyNet
How we’ve acted on your feedback
- We listened to you when you asked for better reporting, introducing improved monthly service reports.
- We discovered that some customers felt we weren’t answering questions in enough depth, or not providing enough updates ahead of regular meetings. We are addressing this by providing updates as they happen instead of weekly. Also, we have introduced a weekly internal review for each project to ensure we’re providing full and detailed responses.
- We introduced our monthly Office 365 round-up, which brings you information on new features and key updates that might affect your organisation. We subsequently enhanced the written summaries with a video version published to YouTube each month.
- A concern was raised on one project that there was no back-up point of contact when the project’s dedicated developer was off. We brought on an additional developer to be able to step in as needed.
- Much of the feedback was very positive, and we fed all your comments back to the team.
Your feedback in numbers
We started regular feedback surveys in 2017, but – following low response rates – we switched this year to a simple, one-question format. This resulted in much higher response rates and more qualitative feedback (i.e. comments) than we’ve ever had. Overall, the ratings in the most recent round of surveys were very positive, although we did receive some criticism too, which we have acted on and used to improve how we do things.
Going forward, we will continue to conduct surveys twice a year, with the results being shared at the start of June and December.
We received survey responses from 25 people representing 11 organisations. We heard back from three quarters of the organisations we invited to complete the survey. We only asked one question, requesting a rating from 1 to 10: How well do you feel our engagement has gone?
The average score for this period was 9, indicating generally high satisfaction; we were very grateful to everyone who provided comments on what we could do better.
The outlying low score was particularly useful; it highlighted a significant ongoing problem with one customer’s project which we hadn’t spotted. The situation was out of the ordinary and we immediately took action to understand what had gone wrong. Our senior team, including our CEO Andy, met with the organisation in question to work together to get to the bottom of the issue and resolve it to the customer’s satisfaction.
We are sharing this in order to encourage you to give us a low score or comment if you have genuine problems or concerns. You won’t hurt our feelings, and we’d much rather know about and make it right.
Progress
While seeing the scores graphed like this is encouraging, we are more interested in actively tracking how the scores change over time, in order to make sure we are improving. We use a system based on the ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS) system, the results from which were as follows:
From the graph, you can infer sentiment, how many people responded, and how well we’re performing. It takes into account the views both of ‘detractors’ – those who rated us very low – and of ‘promoters’ – those who rated us highly.
In 2017, we were scoring poorly – a negative result – based on a small sample size; the feedback spurred us to make changes to how we interact with our customers. In 2018, the sample size increased slightly, and we were now receiving more positive scores than negative ones.
We realised that, in order to get useful feedback from more of our customer base, we needed to make the feedback survey less arduous to complete. We reduced it to one question, with an optional comment, and issued it towards the end of projects. This meant that this year the volume of feedback increased significantly. We are pleased to say that the scoring has also improved significantly, so it looks like we are much closer to getting things right.
We want to make sure the excellence and attention to detail we aim to achieve is experienced by everyone with whom we work. Please feel completely free to share any questions or concerns (or praise!) – either through the survey, or directly with your contacts at CompanyNet.
Recent feedback comments
You can browse through all the comments we received in the latest feedback surveys below. Identifying information, such as project names, has been removed.
Keeping our team appraised
We are also making efforts to ensure CompanyNet’s staff are well-informed about what’s happening with each customer. While not everyone works on every project, we are a small, close-knit company, so it’s important to us that there is a broad knowledge across our team of the work we’re doing.
We hold an all-company meeting at the start of each week with an update on every customer project. This keeps all CompanyNet staff up to date on what’s happening, and gives them the chance to ask questions or offer their ideas.
We also periodically survey our people to discover any gaps in knowledge; based on this, we hold additional ‘deep dive’ sessions. These sessions let those working on the project share what they are doing, what challenges they’ve faced, what they learned, and what’s coming next.
Thank you
Thank you again to those who took the time to complete our survey. We hope this report shows how we take genuine action based on the feedback, and that it encourages even more of our valued customers to give us feedback in future. If you have any questions, please drop us a line.