Get the Most Out of Facilities Customer Satisfaction Surveys

In a climate of declining budgets and rising student and faculty expectations, a better understanding of customer wants and needs can help facilities ensure best use of limited resources. To that end, facilities departments are increasingly turning to annual customer satisfaction surveys to measure their campuses’ views of facilities performance.

To see value from customer satisfaction surveys, institutions must address three challenges. First, facilities leaders must clearly outline their aspirations for the survey so they can better identify questions that yield actionable responses. Then, leaders must create an outreach plan that includes all necessary constituents and provides a full picture of campus opinions. Finally, facilities units should use strategic analyses to understand responses and make informed, customer-centric decisions about resource allocation, investments, and more.

This brief is divided into three sections that explore customer satisfaction surveys in greater detail. The first section provides guidance on selecting the survey questions that will yield valuable data. The second section focuses on survey deployment tactics, helping institutions determine when and how to deploy a survey for maximum reach. The third section helps institutions understand how to analyze and share survey results.

Survey design

Different types of survey questions provide complementary information. To that end, a good survey strikes a balance among three types of questions: demographic, Likert-scale, and open-ended. Make sure your survey asks targeted questions to get the right data.

• Lesson 1: Select Demographic Questions that Expand Analysis Options
• Lesson 2: Measure Satisfaction and Value with Likert-Scale Questions
• Lesson 3: Solicit Immediately Actionable Information Through Comments

Survey deployment

Once facilities has designed the survey, the next step is to create a deployment plan that will achieve healthy response rates. Even a 10% response rate can yield valuable information, but a good survey plan can help institutions reach a target rate of 30%. More importantly, a thorough survey deployment plan can reach survey respondents from a broad range of campus constituencies.

• Lesson 4: Target a Diverse and Inclusive Respondent Pool
• Lesson 5: Promote Survey through Multiple Channels
• Lesson 6: Maximize Response Rates Through Timing and Incentives

Survey analysis

Even institutions with well-designed surveys and high response rates may still struggle to use the data to improve their operations. The following lessons provide guidance on analyzing and disseminating survey results to ensure facilities departments realize the survey’s full value.

• Lesson 7: Use Internal Benchmarks to Measure facilities Performance
• Lesson 8: Analyze Quantitative Responses to Identify Areas for Improvement
• Lesson 9: Address Comments from Open-Ended Questions Directly
• Lesson 10: Communicate Results and Plan of Action to Campus Community

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