I just completed face to face satisfaction surveys with Sitewire’s largest clients. From my perspective, this was the very best use of my time as a CEO since starting the company 10.5 years ago. I went on a cross country tour to meet with our clients and to hear first hand their impression of our work, our people and our value to their business.
My commitment to the clients was to use their feedback only in a positive and constructive way with their counterparts on my team. I did both formal quantitative and informal surveys. I took copious notes and let them do 90% of the talking.
What I learned was the good, the bad and the ugly about what our clients think of our business practices. The good news is they all value their relationship with Sitewire enough to be honest and direct about their assessment of our performance. The great news is they shared with me what needs to change to grow their relationship with us.
With their input, I have been able to establish our internal priorities and road map around process and service delivery improvements. I now have a measurement tool that I can use to quantify our progress against our goals for client satisfaction. I learned great insights about our clients future plans and aspirations so that we can create our roadmap for service offerings and innovation to help them achieve their goals. The greatest takeaway for me was to learn how important our partnership is to our clients’ success and their commitment to Sitewire.
The following quote is from my favorite management guru, Peter Drucker, which gets to the heart of why I put such a high value on the exercise of surveying and understanding the satisfaction level of our clients.
“The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.”
Peter Drucker
