April 1999
PM217: PROJECT MANAGEMENT

QUESTION 4

Total Marks: 20 Marks

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GRADE A
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Customer satisfaction is an integral consideration for any project manager. In addition, it is frequently commented that customer satisfaction does not happen by accident - it is the result of planned, and conscientious action taken to ensure that we change the way we approach our work.

Based on your understanding of customers, and effective communication with customers, write a short report on customer satisfaction. Ensure in your report that you discuss the following aspects in your report:

  • Why satisfying customers is inherently difficult.
  • What some customer expectations of us are.
  • The qualities of individual that will make certain that good communication with our customers exist.
  • Organisational-wide approaches that can be adopted to encourage a customer-orientation.
  • How difficult customers can be handled.

You should give equal weight to all five parts of your discussion. Ensure that each part of your report is well-elaborated and the use of relevant examples will gain extra credit. Each part of your report should include a detailed discussion of at least two key points.

 [20]
Why satisfying customers is inherently difficult?
  1. First we need to identify who our customers are. Today in this competitive environment, we deal with multiple customers instead of single customer. For example, to set up a point-entry terminal for a company having 20 branches. We need to deal with multiple users, they are sales managers, finance department, human resources, etc.
  2. Each customers enumerated here has different set of interests. Human resources department would like to know how to train their staff, users want user-friendliness features, finance want to know how to collate the data, etc.
  3. Project staff faced difficulties sorting through contending need of different customer to define customers needs and requirements.
  4. Project staff need to recognize that nothing obvious or trivial about identify who are our customers.

What customer expectations of us are

  1. Customer expect the good or service they receive are usable.
    For example, customer purchase a computer, he expect when he power up, he should be able to see 'Windows95' and all application needed are loaded and functioning properly.
  2. Customer expect us to keep our promises.
    If we promise to deliver goods on certain date, we must keep it before it is implemented too late to be effective.
  3. Customer expect us to be technically competent and provide them with good service.
    If customer's computer breakdown, we cannot send someone to attend the fault the whole day but still cannot solve the problem.
  4. Customer expect us to understand their needs and to address them effectively.
    Some of the customer do not know what they wants, they expect us to understand what they wants and translate it to useful requirements or clear needs.

The qualities of the individual

  1. Project staff must have strong ability to deal with customers and extract some sense of what customers needs or wants.
  2. Must be articulate
    So that we can take the fuzzy suggestion and convert it to clear needs and then translate it to useful requirements.
  3. Must be open-minded and have good imagination
    So that we can offer some alternatives to solve problem.
  4. Must has high tolerance of ambiguity
    So as to extract some useful sense of what's customer is trying to say.

Organization wide approach

  1. Reformatting corporate culture
    Including changing staff attitude, adopt good ones and stop no good attitudes/ procedures.
  2. Focus on stability and continuity
    Project face constant changes, sources of changes are change of player, customer changer their mind, changing environment.
  3. Assume a life cycle perspective
    The project does not stop at handover the project, must still continue to monitor the operation.
  4. Establish method and procedures to meet customer satisfaction.
    Set up procedure to handle problems.
  5. Strengthen project capabilities
    Send staff for training and learn essential tools to do the project.

How difficult customers can be handled

  1. Remind customer organization of its contractual obligation.
  2. Emphasize the importance to project success of meeting certain key milestones, including those requirements customer inputs.
  3. Establish sterring committee to oversee project progress.
  4. Within our limitations, try to acced to customer requests.