Customer Satisfaction as Guiding Principle

March 22, 2022 | Reading time: 4 min

Quality and reliability are the key drivers for our daily work. That’s why we have strengthened our focus on customer satisfaction with an integrated monitoring system. Curious how? We take you behind the scenes.

How does a holistic understanding of the customer experience emerge?

Our technology is still relatively new compared to the traditional manufacturing industry. And we can only successfully demonstrate the true value of Additive Manufacturing (AM) if our products and solutions meet the expectations of our customers and help them implement their corporate strategies with innovative strength. That is why we place great emphasis on our customers' success.

By understanding our customers' experiences with our solutions, we can continuously improve and follow our purpose of “Leading the World into Responsible Manufacturing with Industrial 3D Printing”. Therefore, the focus on customer satisfaction is anchored in the EOS' corporate strategy and measured with a Key Performance Indicator.

Benchmarking with the industry we use the dominant customer satisfaction metric Net Promoter Score (NPS) as standard. It is an established insights tool to gauge the loyalty of customers.

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, entrepreneur and philanthropist

The NPS Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated based on responses to one question:
“How likely is it that you would recommend EOS to a friend or colleague?” The scoring for this answer is based on a 0 to 10 scale.

The person who answers the questions then gets to score on a scale that most often goes from 0-10. People who score high (around 9-10) are called Promoters, those who score 7-8 are called Passives and the rest (0-6) are called Detractors.

Scores can range from −100 (lowest, everybody is a detractor) to +100 (highest, everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is rated as excellent.

Who and what contributes to overall satisfaction?

We began implementing an EOS customer satisfaction system for service quality as a starting point in 2020. But for us customer satisfaction is not only influenced by the colleagues having direct interaction with our customers. It reflects our efforts along the entire customer journey. Therefore, we are extending the evaluation to so called ‘moments of truth’ and scale this approach globally.  All stakeholders are involved in the design, results, and follow-up of the satisfaction enquiries.

Moments of truth represent the points in a customer journey where a key event occurs and when an opinion about the company is formed. Simply said, these are the touchpoints where our customers either fall in love with our solutions or turn away.

Using the same metric - in our case, the Net Promotor Score and a 5-star rating for specific questions - is critical to combining measurements on identified ‘moments of truth’ to provide a comprehensive view. Survey flow, questions and response scales are aligned for a common measurement logic. This enables a better understanding of the correlation between our customer's overall impression and the rating of the corresponding interaction. What influence does excellent service operation have on whether the customer will recommend EOS to others? What does Field Service contribute to overall satisfaction? Understanding these relationships can help address blind spots and make improvements. 

How does a comprehensive feedback process work?

The survey is in place and feedback is coming – what now? If insight into survey results and customer perceptions is limited to executives, the opportunity to close the feedback loop and thus improve customer satisfaction is lost. Communication to everyone involved is required to reflect and take actions where needed. Triggered notifications in the event of a poor rating or a request to be contacted will be forwarded directly to the appropriate manager at EOS.  Overall results and trends are published on a regular basis.

A closed feedback loop links meaningful metrics and information to action and promotes a customer-centric culture - and thus customer satisfaction.

We firmly believe that gathering customer feedback is an excellent tool for ongoing dialogue to understand where we are successful and where our blind spots lie. We foster a healthy and profitable relationship with our customers by prioritizing, evaluating, and continuously improving our offering and processes.  

Share your view and make a meaningful contribution

Customer feedback is critical and we want to motivate our customers to regularly take part in our satisfaction survey. We combine our focus on customer satisfaction with social commitment. So, the time invested into feedback pays off twice.

 We dedicated the business year 2020/21 to the Grow My Tree afforestation projects with the goal of absorbing CO2 emissions and creating social impact. So far, 440 tree plantings have been generated.

2022, our focus is on improved living conditions and future opportunities through equal access to education for children in developing countries. We have chosen SAWABONA, a small organisation that works on a voluntary basis and without administrative fees - all funds generated go 1:1 to hand-picked projects in South Africa.  

Focus areas are skills development, jobs, schooling, after-school care, diversity, education and careers.