FM is oftenabout flexibility and adapting to quickly changing circumstances.  Dean Judge, of Faceo FM, explains how to measure and improve your performance in customer service.

There is an old adage, “If you don’t take care of your customers, somebody else will.”

I am sure that in this customer facing environment we find ourselves operating in that you will have policies, processes, initiatives and communication skills that keep the wheels of the supplier /client relationship turning.

Measuring customer satisfaction is not an exact science; from our initial Client introductions and throughout the contract lifecycle we develop an understanding of what is expected of us as FM providers. We create the formal systems through Service Level Agreements and Key Performance Indicators; we measure progress and implement changes through action plans. We also develop our informal relationships thus ensuring that we are approachable and adaptable to the daily changes. So that should do the trick then, everything covered and we can go and concentrate on the day job!

And there we have a potential problem, isn’t the day job all about delivering customer satisfaction? The soft services element of our industry is predominantly customer facing; front of house, catering, security, cleaning they all have customer interactions and therefore can be seen to be delivering as required. Out of hours working and maintaining remote plant rooms are hardly conducive to enhancing informal relations, so how do we create the same perception of a job well done when the “nuts and bolts” side of our commitment can sometimes be invisible to the Client?

When I talk to my FM colleagues around our UK portfolio I am constantly told how flexible and adaptive they have to be on a daily basis. What was planned in good faith one day can be overtaken by other areas the next. The FM’s then have to manage their available resources to deliver the new requirements.

I am sure we are not alone in having to deal with changing requirements, indeed we promote ourselves as being flexible and adaptable and fundamentally believe that this is the key strength of any service partner. We know that when delivering the hugely diverse services that FM provides we cannot expect the plans to stay constant. But the consequences of changing plans is that they are difficult to measure especially if they are informal requests and don’t always fit into that grey category we call variable.  

Where do we go from here?

How do we effectively manage the immovable areas of delivery that we are measured on through the SLA system but also be seen to deliver our Client’s changing needs through a flexible and positive approach?

The FM industry has a good track record of adapting to challenges and this particular one identified a number of areas that needed further investigation. Recognising that businesses are bound by the need to strategically compete and improve performance measurement is a major business mechanism; enabling organisational change, improvement, productivity, and superiority that need to be understood in more depth if it is to help with ever changing Client priorities. It was also felt that the current systems that incorporate traditional financial measures whilst not necessarily past their sell by date were not wide enough on their own to deliver the customer satisfaction measurement the industry is looking for.

The first step was to look at what FM industry benchmarks for improving customer satisfaction were being used. As you would expect the traditional business reporting tools such as the balanced scorecard were there in abundance. For those not familiar with this concept it can be a great tool to ensure you are putting the appropriate time and effort into key areas such as Financial, Internal Processes, Learning & Growth (culture) and of course the Customer. However this method does have its critics, the scores are not based on any proven economic or financial theory and is therefore entirely subjective. Others find that the Balanced Scorecard does not provide a bottom line score or a unified view with clear recommendations.

To use a marketing phrase more research was required, the FM industry needed to understand in a wider context what tools were available to measure customer satisfaction that exceeded the scope of current benchmarking methodology.

Partnering with academia

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) is one of the country’s leading institutions for the built environment. Their research programme had already started to look into customer satisfaction benchmarking within the FM industry and they have enlisted an industry practitioner to help with their initial research findings. This involved asking over 200 FM solution buyers their views on current satisfaction methodology; it concluded that there were key problems associated with customer performance measurement in FM.

• The understanding of customer satisfaction as an effective and accessible means of performance measurement within the Facilities Management (FM) industry was poor  
• Since FM’s relatively recent development; progression and sophistication towards performance measurement systems has been slow, powered predominantly by traditional financial, cost-focused measures
• Awareness of alternative (non-financially incorporated) methods has thus been sparse
• An imbalance exists, in particular with regards to the accessibility and emphasis of customer satisfaction performance measurement within FM, which is still invisible when compared to other performance factors

These findings matched the insight of many people within the FM industry. The research contends that the whole area of customer satisfaction as an effective and complimentary performance measurement tool needed to be revisited in order to raise its awareness and accessibility to the FM industry. Not only however do customer satisfaction performance indicators need to be developed, but the actual application within the organisational context needed to be researched in order to gain an understanding of how FM provider organisations strategically incorporate customer benchmarks by comparing generic performance to their own client base.  

It was found that research in FM is yet to develop a customer satisfaction performance measurement system that is accessible to all involved in the FM industry, (i.e. all companies have their own systems which don’t allow Client’s to assess like for like) and consequently they are not easily incorporated into customised organisational strategy.

The LJMU research programme was therefore designed to develop a strategic framework that would create a generic customer satisfaction benchmark process within the UK.  The benchmarks would be designed to contain distinct factors in order to make them as effective, relevant, measurable and useful as possible and take into account the changing flexible Client requirements that the initial problem highlighted.

Implementing the internal research

Once the national benchmarking exercise had been completed the University talked to a further cross service sample that included Clients and Operations Teams which enabled them to gain a further in depth understanding of what they saw as the deficiencies in the current satisfaction methodology.  This provided a direct comparison to evaluate how the FM industry was performing against the perceived national standards.

Gap analysis

There were now over 200 national responses to analyse against the new data from the Clients and Operations teams. Questionnaires and face to face interviews created a report that showed that to have an effective customer satisfaction process it would require the flexibility to adapt to changing priorities. In addition it also found that:

• Services rated highest by quality and efficiency (e.g. reception, health & safety, mailroom); rated lowest in terms of outsourcing (i.e. they are predominantly provided in-house)
• Conversely, services rated low by quality and efficiency (e.g. waste management, M&E engineering, cleaning), rated high in terms of outsourcing.  The exception here was building fabric and catering
• Customers generally rated ‘front-line’ or ‘soft’ services as most critical, (health and safety, mail room, reception), as opposed to more ‘hard’ services (waste management and building fabric)
• The exception was that M&E engineering was rated as most critical to their operations, but interestingly rated as one of the least efficient, along with other hard services such as waste management and building fabric.

What next…

You may feel that your current customer satisfaction process is adequate and fit for purpose. What has been created is an industry specific customer satisfaction template that will allow you to:

• dig deep into your current customer satisfaction processes and analyse its effectiveness through your own gap analysis
• decrease the perception gap between your Operations and Commercial teams
• gain relevant feedback from your clients which can be assessed against your own understanding of service delivery and will enable you to measure your current customer satisfaction processes

Customer satisfaction is the key to retaining and gaining your clients, because if you don’t take care of your customers, then somebody else will. The FM industry has excellent research to help with your programmes and continues to face the challenges innovatively and in tune with Client perceptions.
About the author:

Dean Judge is Marketing Director for Faceo FM. He can be contacted on This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it