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Published in:
2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
5. Customer Satisfaction in IT Professional Services Research
Author : Mircea Motogna
Published in: Development, Growth and Finance of Organizations from an Eastern European Context
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
Working as a Project Office Manager in a company active in business-to-business IT Professional Services (PS), I’m directly interested in the importance of measuring and analyzing Customer Satisfaction for the success of our business. Our company has set the Customer Satisfaction as a major objective for each professional employee (with different levels of importance). For example, the middle management has only two objectives: Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance (profitability and revenue).
Why is Customer Satisfaction an objective of such importance? It is obvious that in PS activities, the cost of attracting new customers is greater than the cost of retaining them. The marketing literature and much empirical research showed a strong correlation between Customer Satisfaction and loyalty to the company, leading to a lower turnover of the company’s present customers.
In this context, it is important to assess if these two objectives (Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance) are compatible – is it possible to have satisfied customers and also make good profit? It might seem as an irrelevant question, but in fact it has great importance – for example, if the market main characteristic is to be price sensitive, then competing on price and operational excellence should be the main focus – while Customer Satisfaction becomes secondary. How are we actually standing in the IT Professional Services industry?
Our company is running Customer Satisfaction surveys four times per year (every quarter). The surveys are designed in such a way as to give us feedback in three directions:
1.
Overall rating (in general, satisfaction of the customers regarding collaboration with our company expressed by a number from 1 to 5)
2.
Team score average (concrete feedback regarding the team serving that customer – seven questions, each of them with ratings from 1 to 5) – this is one of the scores used for each professional employee’s evaluation.
3.
Recommendation Rating (answering the question “Would you recommend our company to a business partner?” – rating from 1 to 10) – this is used to calculate NPS (Net Promoter Score – by identifying categories of customers: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors).
Our company is also running Employee Satisfaction surveys two times per year by getting feedback from each team member working for a specific customer and a specific project – this makes it easy to relate Employee Satisfaction with the project’s performance.
The purpose of this research is to analyze the correlation between the three types of ratings received from customers and also to find out if there are correlations between Customer Satisfaction ratings and the Financial Performance of those projects. We would also like to find if Employee Satisfaction is related somehow to Customer Satisfaction and the Financial Performance of projects.
In the end, this research wants to prove that the two main objectives (Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance) are compatible (or even sustaining each other) and that Employee Satisfaction is an important factor influencing both of them. These expected findings are supported by previous research and results published in the literature, but the current research is done in an IT Professional Services company (a case study) that might reveal industry-specific aspects worth considering.
For this research, I have collected all the data regarding Customer Satisfaction measurements in 2014 together with the employees’ feedback and the financial results of each project of our company.