Need ideas for client feedback.

[stevena]

Hello

I work for a TPA and I am creating a feedback questionnaire which we will send out with our annual reports. I am wondering if anyone else does this and how your return is on these. Also looking for ideas on what to ask. This is to get feedback on quality of our services, etc.

thanks a lot

Lisa

[ccassetty]

I think that if you get back 10% of your questionnaires you should consider the exercise a success.

As to the questions to ask? Put yourself in your clients' shoes. What do they want? Such things as: responsiveness to questions and problems, easy to understand correspondence that contains useful information, confidence that they are dealing with knowledgeable people, etc. Once you have a list of what your clients want, build your questions around whether or not you are delivering.

Stay away from questions such as "Are reports timely and accurate?" In the first place, how would the client know if the report is accurate? Sure they can check the participant data, but they haven't the foggiest idea how to check the tests, nor do they want to take the time to check the reports, that’s your job. Secondly, this type of question could lead to doubts in the clients mind that perhaps the quality of your work leaves something to be desired. As to timeliness, you know already if you are meeting industry standards and your promise to the client on turn around time.

Also nebulous questions such as "How would you rate our services?" don't tell you anything. Ask concrete questions such as: "Is the correspondence you receive from us clear and useful?" You can ask for comments, but most will only check the boxes provided. So, it is important to word your questions so that a yes or no answer or a scale of 1-10 will actually provide useful information. Limit your questions to one page, the less time the survey takes, the more likely you are to get responses back. Be sure to enclose a SASE for return of the questionnaire.

If you can think of some incentive that you could provide to encourage return of the questionnaire, that might increase your response rate. If you tell the recipients of the survey that they will receive a little thank you gift for returning the survey, it might encourage a few more responses. Regardless of whether you include a gift or not, a thank you note to the client for taking the time to respond would be in nice.

Another point is to be careful about who receives the survey and that they can actually answer the questions. If you send the president of the company a questionnaire about the day to day operations of the plan, you are likely to not get the survey back, and if you do, the answers may not be helpful because this is not the person that deals with the plan on a day to day basis.

You will also want to ask for permission to call back the respondent with questions. If you get particularly bad grades from someone, I’m sure you would want to call them back to find out what you can do to turn things around and to find out more details about what has happened to cause them to be so dissatisfied with your service.

Hope this helps

[stevena]

Wow thanks so much, that really helped! My two questions were, in fact, "are our reports timely and accurate" and "how do you rate our overall services"~! It was a great help how you articulated everything. I think my questionnaire will be more thoughtful now. Thanks again!

Lisa

[E as in ERISA]

What is the purpose of the survey? Sometimes the company is just looking for "nice comments" to put in a brochure. But some clients may also note areas for improvement (and may continue to notice them after the survey is done...they will mentally check their responses against your performance on a going forward basis). How will the company respond? Does the company plan to do followup, including spending time and money to correct any deficiencies that are noted?

[stevena]

We will just be using it to review administrators and to try to improve the administration department. I have it mostly drafted, Basically it asks the following: (i stole some ideas from the prior poster)

1. how efficient is your administrator in responding to your needs

2. how effective is your administrator in responding to your problems

3. how do you rate the quality of the work which your administrator produces?(i defined quality)

4. do you have confidence that your plan is being serviced by a knowledgeable administrator

5. how do you rate your administrator's response time to your requests

6. what is your overall impression of the quality of service you are provided

then, the open comments section

then I asked if we could contact them about their responses.

I hope to be able to retain clients better by hopefully getting any problems or issues they are having with administration before it becomes a bigger problem. SO i am thinking we will send this out with a yearly mailing, like their 5500/annual report mailing.?

[Brian Gallagher]

I don't know what your budget is, but you may want to consider having a third party do the survey for you. A good company will have experience in choosing the best questions and wording them in the best way. It will aslo determine the best scale. We use a 1-7 scale, and strive to have 90% 6 and 7's.

You may lose specific client comments. Well, not entirely. Our survey company culls together the results and gives us the overall scores, as well as all the written comments. However, the survey is entirely anonymus, so we don't know who exactly is bad-mouthing or praising us. I feel that we can find a lot more policy-wide deficiencies that way, rather than plan-specific complaints.