The benchmark

Measuring customer satisfaction is one way to ensure clients will return – but we're not talking your bog-standard handover questionnaire. Contractors are starting to realise that ticking boxes on a form is not good enough if they want to find out what the customer really thinks, and are appointing people who are independent of the project team to interview the client on a one-to-one basis at various stages of the building process. But it is how contractors use this information to improve their service that will determine whether customers are satisfied.

An industry leader in the use of key performance indicators, construction manager Mace's approach is to employ a full-time best-practice manager, Haroona Irshad. She carries out three one-hour-long interviews with the client for each project. "It gives customers a chance to have their say," she explains. "If something has gone wrong we can find out why, or they can say it's just going fine." The first interview takes place at the start of the project to establish customer expectations, the second is held halfway through to find out how Mace is performing, and the final interview is carried out on handover to determine overall customer satisfaction. Mace is now conducting a further interview at the end of the defects liability period to ensure quality is maintained.

In each interview, Irshad takes the client through 47 questions covering five headline topics. These include the following points: how Mace personnel have performed on delivery, relationships, and health and safety; how effectively the programme was planned and managed; how the budget and suppliers were managed; and quality control. Irshad will ask the client for specific examples, and why the client has given a particular rating for each question. She then prepares a report that is seen only by the project team, plus Mace directors. This information then feeds back into site practice.

Mace was construction manager on GlaxoSmithKline's headquarters at Brentford, (pictured), which was created in 39 months and completed last year. GSK project director David Warburton says: "The customer survey process was very helpful. This was a good project, and it improved things that were going well already."

The survey identified GSK's concerns that Mace was too close to their supply chain. "This might have been just a perception, but there was a concern that if there was a financial claim, Mace may not have taken it as seriously as they could." Warburton says once this issue was identified, Mace "stepped back behind the dotted line".

The survey also revealed a problem with a member of the Mace team. Halfway through the project, GSK changed procurement route. "This left us with a very challenging timeframe to complete the project," says Warburton. The construction manager was not prepared to take risks, in effect adding time to the programme. Mace responded by replacing the construction manager with someone who had a more can-do approach. As a result, the project was completed successfully and GSK gave Mace an overall customer satisfaction rating of 95% (see graph), which compares very well with the industry average of 74% for customer satisfaction (for service), and Mace's in-house target of 83%.

The surveys are also useful if a client's priorities change in a long-term partnering arrangement. Mace has been building Cannons health and fitness clubs (pictured overleaf) since 1997 and had been doing well with ratings of 84% ("The benchmark", 10 August 2001). But after Cannons went through a management buyout at the end of 2001, the score suddenly dropped to 77%.

Unknown to Mace, Cannons' priorities had changed. Quality was now a top priority for improvement because of the disruption to the club that fixing defects could cause. "If we have defects in the first 12 months, it can have a significant effect on our business," says Ken Redman, Cannons' technical director. But once the issue of post-contract defects management had been raised, meetings were set up to work out the best way to tackle the problem.

The result was a 10-point action plan to improve quality. Mace now builds in a two-week intensive snagging period into the 14-week construction programme. Cannons' operations manager, who is responsible for running the completed building, also uses these two weeks to get to know how the buildings systems work. "Customer satisfaction surveys certainly help, as sometimes you lose sight of the little things," says Redman. "The construction aspects are also important to our customer operations teams, what's important to them is often different than what's important to the property teams." The Wimbledon club was finished in July 2002 and E E Cannons gave Mace a 94% rating (see graph).

Waring Contractors is another firm that has seen results through benchmarking customer satisfaction. It does this by carrying out a monthly written survey and has also recently started to conduct face-to-face interviews with the client at the end of the project. Like Mace, it uses someone outside the project team.

Although the interview takes place at the end of the project, the information feeds back into the business as a whole and informs the next project with framework partners. The company has set itself an overall target of 70% for customer satisfaction, but is thinking about raising this, as it has achieved an average of 77% for the last four months.

The value of this process came to light when surveys revealed framework client BAA was not entirely happy with Waring's performance. Project delivery was fine, but BAA was unhappy with Waring's product development – it wanted prefabricated solutions to speed-build programmes and minimise disruption to airport users.

Waring responded by talking to its suppliers, including steelworks supplier Lee Warren. One simple solution was to prefabricate standard corners used for trolley guides – the rails that protect walls from being bashed by luggage trolleys. Previously, these were specially made for each corner on site. Waring also prefabricated a lift shaft for Heathrow and craned it in overnight instead of spending five weeks making it on site.

But demanding clients are not always big corporations. Contractor Makers does a lot of social housing refurbishment work, employing health, safety, quality and environment advisors who, like Mace and Waring, are independent of the project team and visit sites monthly. In one instance, advisors found that the tenants were not happy with Makers because they wanted to be more involved choosing finishes, and they didn't like being in their flat while work was carried out. The contractor responded by providing a showroom so the tenants could choose their kitchen style and colour, and creating a "refuge" with a TV and coffee-making facilities to which tenants could escape.

The downside of customer benchmarking is that it is perhaps most relevant to contractors who are least likely to bother benchmarking. "The survey just records what takes place through the project – but it may work better on projects where things aren't going so well," says GSK's Warburton. And Cannons' Redman points out: "Whether it makes a huge difference is questionable, as we always make sure we start with people who have the right attitude."

Indeed, he wonders whether Mace has gone too far with its surveys, adding: "Mace were a lot harsher on themselves than we were in our own performance review."