We want our customers' feedback to make sure we are seeing things through their eyes. Surveying our customers gives us both a sanity check and insight on what we could do better.

During the two years that we surveyed our customers via mail, we learned that the key to getting feedback was to continue to ping, which meant sending follow-up mailings, faxes, and phone calls. It was a good process, but very labor intensive.

We used Survey Advantage for the first time last summer. Survey Advantage's email system was easy; it doubled our feedback rate, and required very little manpower from us. We could decide how general or specific to make the questions. For instance, we started by asking some open-ended questions on things like quality, delivery, and pricing, and then progressed to more segmented and detailed questions that gave us important feedback on particular departments, such as engineering management, billing, and customer service.

Survey Advantage makes gathering continuous feedback systemic, without me having to manage it myself. It also gives us a forum to thank customers for their feedback, and relay to them what we learned from their feedback and what changes we are going to make as a result.

The most significant area where we received feedback was the responsiveness of our engineering support and on-time delivery for first article parts. As a result, we are instituting a better communication process and tracking system so we can measure and monitor our on-time delivery performance. That was the heart of the data - the feedback prioritized our issues for us, and we tackled that first.