One of the most important objectives of the KISTERS quality management system is to enhance customer satisfaction permanently.
Our quality manual specifies it: the quality policy of KISTERS includes, amongst others, three important statements concerning customer satisfaction:
Quality results from our disposition to take responsibility for every step of development, production, and service processes.
Customer focus means for us to know exactly about the current and future requirements of our customers and to fulfill them in a flexible and competent way.
Overriding business objective is to build up long term and sustainable relationships with our customers, partners, and suppliers based on a policy of partnership.
That means to identify the requirements of customers, to implement them into software products or consultant services and thereby assure the satisfaction with our products and services.
Determination of Customer Satisfaction
There are various sources of information to monitor customer satisfaction:
Sales representatives and product managers are in close contact with the customers.
User conferences are held at regular intervals. Interested customers have the oppor-tunity to exchange experiences with other users. They are also requested to report comments, complaints, desires, or suggestions for improvement to KISTERS representatives.
Customer surveys are performed at regular intervals by sending a questionnaire to a representative number of customers. The questionnaire deals with questions concerning the quality of KISTERS products and services.
Training courses and workshops are also a good source for feedback of customers.
The attendees of training courses fill in training evaluation sheets which give us a feedback on the quality of course contents, implementation, venue and organization of the training.
Customer requests (support calls, problems, complaints, error messages) follow a quality management procedure called “Monitoring and Control of Nonconforming Products”
Improvement of Customer Satisfaction
All information about customer requests are collected and analyzed by the product managers.
The product managers will plan short and long term improvement actions in cooperation with the sales representatives and with the head of division or CEO where required. The results from customer surveys and other feedback have to be taken into account for decisions on product planning and future software development. The team derives the demand for im-provement actions and plans actions to be taken in the subsequent year.
All improvement actions are regularly reviewed by the general management.
Resolving Customer Requests
The procedure for monitoring and control of customer requests includes incoming support calls, complaints, error messages, change requests, and other questions from customers.
All incoming customer requests are recorded and administrated with the bug tracking tool BugZilla. All staff members who are involved in the process of resolving customer requests work with BugZilla. So the complete lifecycle of every request is traceable. A detailed work instruction describes how to use the bug tracking tool and ensures that all employees deal with requests in an analogous manner.
The reporting of a request is done in an input mask where the reporter has to fill in detailed information including e.g. software product, version number, priority and severity of a bug, steps to reproduce the problem.
Resolving Customer Requests
The procedure for monitoring and control of customer requests includes incoming support calls, complaints, error messages, change requests, and other questions from customers.
All incoming customer requests are recorded and administrated with the bug tracking tool BugZilla. All staff members who are involved in the process of resolving customer requests work with BugZilla. During the lifecycle of a request every activity is recorded and can be reproduced at any time. So the complete lifecycle of every request is traceable.
