Customer satisfaction is the degree to which there is match between the customer’s expectations of a product and the actual performance of the product. Expectations are formed based on information consumers receive from promotions, family, friends, opinion leaders, research, and past experience with the product.
True, customer satisfaction is a form of participant reaction as opposed to an outcome. However, it’s still an important measure of the ability of an organization to successfully meet the needs of its customer. It also helps demonstrate an organization’s worth and effectiveness to its stakeholders which is critical in maintaining their support.
The concept of customer satisfaction is easily transferred to Extension programming – with the product being an educational activity. To assure “return business” from clientèle in the future, we need to ask basic questions such as:
- How satisfied are they with the product they receive?
- Are we meeting their expectations?
- What are we doing right? Wrong?
- How can we improve?
- Did the product help them make a decision about their own situation?
The customer satisfaction program within Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service is designed to address these basic questions to help ensure the agency continues to provide timely, relevant, and effective educational programs to the citizens of Texas.
Customer satisfaction is also a state-mandated performance measure for our agency. Counties need to give attention and care to this data collection effort as its critical to our agency’s continued existence and programmatic success.
Organizational Development has designed two set of scan forms, standard and with client change, that counties can use to meet their customer satisfaction reporting requirement.