Insights

The power of closing the loop humanly and openly

  • By David Baines-Pinchen & Jacqueline Barendregt
  • 29 October 2020
  • Announcement
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Assessing customer satisfaction sits at the heart of all service organisations. It helps to pinpoint areas for development and continues to keep the voice of the customer front and centre in terms of what they value.

It is instrumental in maintaining healthy customer partnerships. In our view, gauging customer satisfaction shouldn’t only be about giving our clients a channel to vent their frustrations or about service or relationship recovery if things get bumpy. Direct, human-to-human customer engagement provides us with rich and continual feedback to deeply
understand what matters most to our clients on multiple dimensions. Our
interactions with them generate actionable insights. Those insights help us
improve engagement quality and examine new directions or solutions. As Peter
Drucker is credited with saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve
it”.

IDEA Pharma’s approach to customer feedback

  • It is a human-to-human engagement that builds actionable insight

  • It requires honest conversation stimulated by open lines of questioning (not defensive or fishing for compliments) 

  • It is an active process, not just passive listening

  • It should be recorded, debriefed and actioned transparently

  • It should be made openly available and shared for review

Making that our customer feedback publicly available is a no brainer. Most of us looking to make significant personal purchases will check customer feedback on Expert Reviews or Amazon to make more informed choices whether a product could be a good fit. According to some estimates, approximately 90% of consumers admit that online customer
reviews influence their buying decisions. Somewhat peculiarly, the discipline
of sharing unfiltered customer feedback is not something the service industry
in life sciences/pharmaceuticals tends to do. At IDEA Pharma, we took the
decision earlier this year to share all of our client feedback. That way, our
customers can get a richer impression of our value proposition.

Between 2015 and 2019, IDEA improved its average client satisfaction score from 3.9/5 for delivery and 4.1/5 for account/project management to 4.4/5 and 4.5/5, respectively.


Over the last five years, IDEA Pharma has significantly upped its performance when it comes to delivery and service. Those kinds of improvements are not academic. We have taken all of our client feedback on board, and we have closed the loop. We will continue to strive for even greater levels of performance and delivery of new capability areas. Watch
this space!

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