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General Company Data
A majority of the respondent firms operate on a regional or national scale - forty-nine percent (49%) operate
regionally and fifteen percent (15%) of the respondents have operations on a national scale. Twenty-two percent
(22%) of the respondents operate within the state and fourteen percent (14%) limit their operations to the local
community.
Sixty percent (60%) of the firms had an annual volume of fifty (50) million or less. Approximately thirty percent
(30%) of the respondents had revenue between $50-250 million/yr and ten percent (10%) had an annual volume
greater than $250 million. Ninety percent of the respondents were commercial builders and the remainders were
industrial firms. An average of forty percent (40%) o
f the respondents’ revenue was from public agencies with the
balance from clients in the private sector.
Forty-nine percent (49%) of the respondents
’
work was negotiated and fifty-one percent was hard bid. A majority of
the respondents’ work
(61%) came from repeat clients. Contractors negotiating the majority of their work had 64%
repeat business. Even contractors obtaining a majority of their work in the hard bid market acquired fifty-eight
percent (58%) of their revenue from repeat clients.
Client Satisfaction Survey
Respondents provided information regarding their financial performance over the past five years. This information
permitted categorization of response data based upon financial performance. To identify best practices, the firms
with the top financial performance were analyzed. Specifically, firms in the top quartile of percentage pretax profit
(based on annual volume) were evaluated. Their responses were means tested to determine how these Top
Performers establish client expectations, obtain feedback, and respond to customer critique(s). The result of that
analysis is as follows:
Establishing Client Expectations.
The top performing firms identified one-on-one discussions with the owner as the most effective method to establish
client expectations. In addition, they regularly use preconstruction meetings prior to the start of a project to help
establish expectations,
determine
performance criteria, and
define team interaction. Insight provided by the
architect/engineer and the contract documents are seen as the least effective method to establish expectations. The
design team and contract may be good sources to establish contract requirements, but are not viewed as effective
tools to identify expectations facilitating client satisfaction.
Formality of the Process.
Firms were asked to provide insight regarding the actual process they used to identify the level of client satisfaction.
Interestingly, only 44% of the top performers had a formal feedback process. The findings of this study support the
assertion that
the formality of a firm’s client feedback system/process is not
correlated with financial performance.
Top performing firms solicit client feedback using either a formal or informal process, and with some firms both
methods are employed.
Contractors with a formal feedback process utilize a questionnaire that is typically prepared using internal personnel.
However, the survey instrument is developed in
collaboration
with the client.
Performance criteria deemed
important to the customer is identified and forms the basis of the survey instrument. A few of the top performing
firms also involve a third party in the development of the questionnaire to enhance instrument objectivity and
comprehensiveness. The formal feedback process generally requires a maximum of 30 minutes with a majority of
firms utilizing a questionnaire
that required less than 15 minutes of the client’s time
to respond.
However, a majority of the top performers utilize a structured, yet informal, client satisfaction feedback process.
These firms submit that face-to-face discussions with the client were the most effective method to
obtain