Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction and Needs Assessment Market Studies

Medical Supplies, Devices, and Services

Steven J. Fuller

InforMedix Marketing Research, Inc.

Who Needs to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Since the early 1980’s, everyone in the medical industries has known how the challenge of cost reduction has revolutionized hospitals and alternate-site providers. What is new is the speed with which medical suppliers are forced to redesign products and services to meet customer requirements, as providers struggle to boost efficiency and while ensuring their quality of service.

How can a manufacturer or service provider continue to meet the changing requirements and preferences of this complex customer base? By regularly measuring customer satisfaction and assessing needs using formalized market research.

This article explains six key steps for designing and conducting a customer satisfaction investigation. It includes examples of survey questions and discussion topics, taken from actual surveys performed by InforMedix Marketing Research.

The term “Customer Satisfaction Study” covers a broad range of methods for measuring performance and finding ways to provide a better product, service, or delivery method. During the past few years, InforMedix Marketing Research has carried out studies with each of the following basic goals:

* To support continuous quality improvement programs with consistent and periodic measurements

* To monitor the level of customer satisfaction to look for early signs of change.

* To find product and service improvements to help medical professionals perform their jobs better.

* To measure sales force and distributor performance.

* To find opportunities for improving in-house customer support.

* To identify special customer groups which need enhanced or alternative types of products or services.

The most basic customer satisfaction investigation is simply a formalized “scan” of the customer base to see how well a...