How to Develop a Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire for the Customers of the Finance Department
A sound business takes the time to understand how it is doing from the customers' perspective. It will help your business or department improve how it serves the customer and ultimately the business. Get different perspectives of how your business is performing so that necessary additions or subtractions can be taken. It will allow you to discover if your practices or services are relevant or useful overall. Developing a customer satisfaction questionnaire for your financial department is a great way to start.
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Instructions
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Develop a list of your customers. From the department's perspective who do you serve? How do you identify them-by department or by individuals within the company or by individuals outside the company (i.e. sales, human resources, executive director, IRS)? This will help you frame your questions. You may find that you need several questionnaire types to truly evaluate your service. For example, a questionnaire to understand each department's experience with the purchasing process or each department's experience with communicating with the finance department (i.e. Is the finance department courteous and approachable?).
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Develop a list of your services and their definitions. Having a list of your services and how you define them will help you create specific questions that align with that service (i.e. accounting: processing accounts receivable and payable; reporting:annual financial statement; auditing:reviewing documentation). By having this information you'll be able to gain a proper measure of the service you provide to your customers. For example you may ask, "Are you satisfied with the accounts receivable or accounts payable processes?" Or "Do you like the changes to the auditing process?" From these responses you'll know what percentage of the company finds the finance department's processes helpful.
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Develop a list of customer touch points. Brainstorm all the areas your customer interacts and engages with you. These are relevant areas the customer will recall when doing business with you, such as email, telephone, in person, interoffice mail, intranet, board meetings or a specific individual). These areas are the ways that will impact how the customer sees you as a department. Having this list will allow you to create relevant questions that have an impact on the customer's experience. For example, "What has been the most effective way to get your questions answered: by telephone, email or in person?" "Is Patrick's weekly conference call helpful for managing your program budget?" Once again the percentage of responses will give you a clear indication of the effectiveness of that touch point.
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Develop your questions. From your three lists, develop specific questions that ask your customer about your services and how they are executed. In developing your questionnaire make sure it's simple for the customer. Be sure to intertwine the questions about the touch points they encounter and how they relate to your service. For example, "Our policy is to submit expense reports by the third Friday of each month via interoffice mail. Has interoffice mail been an effective delivery method?" The percentage of each response will determine if you need to change or maintain your delivery method.
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Develop a measure for each question. For each question you may have a yes or no, a true or false, a number range or multiple choices. Each question's measure should be relevant to your department, so that you can determine the outcomes of your questionnaire. For example, "On a scale from one to five (1=Horrible, 2=Bad, 3=Fair, 4=Satisfactory, 5=Excellent), what is your overall experience with the purchasing department? Simply measure the amount of responses for each number and it's overall percentage. Multiple choice questions would be weighed on numbers of responses to each choice and the resulting percentage of each.
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Use a questionnaire tool or software. There are numerous useful survey tools or software online that will develop your measures and compile the data/results of your questionnaire. They can send the questionnaire out to your customers via email also. These tools provide convenience to both sides and make the process much faster. The benefit of these tools is that you can focus on framing your questions for the type of information you'd like to collect, such as customer satisfaction overall or particular to a single process or service.
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Tips & Warnings
Using the finance department's organizational chart may be a useful tool in developing a questionnaire. Understanding how each person's role effects the customer can help you create appropriate customer satisfaction questions.
Make your questionnaire clear and simple. Customers will refrain from doing a long questionnaire with vague questions or directions.
References
Resources
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