Measuring Customer Satisfaction: The Process

The final area of measurement is customer satisfaction. Are you producing proposals that your customer thinks are high quality? Easy to use? Clear? Persuasive?

To use customer satisfaction as a metric, you first must define who is the "customer.'' The obvious choice, the final decision maker or the client evaluation team, may be only part of the answer. There may be consultants involved in the selection process. In addition, you may have internal customers whose satisfaction matters.

After you've defined who is the customer, your next task is to gather quantifiable, objective measures of customer satisfaction. Win/loss analyses, focus groups, interviews, surveys, and other research tools will help you get the data you need. One useful measure of internal satisfaction is to track red team scores. Are they going up? (Another interesting question is whether good red team scores correlate to winning proposals. If not, it's time to shake up the red team process!)