Competitive Benchmarking with FM Customer and Occupant Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction is arguably one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) in the business world. Facilities management (FM) researchers and practitioners have begun to examine this KPI and adapt it for use in facility services. Most of the adaptations have regarded internal benchmarks and use in quality management. Though research demonstrates the effectiveness of competitive benchmarking and, more specifically, the effectiveness of customer satisfaction as a competitive benchmark, there is little research on how to use customer satisfaction as a competitive benchmark in FM. Researchers have focused on determining the appropriate content for customer service surveys but have not documented how and to what extent the surveys are currently being used. To help fill this gap in the research, an industry-wide study on operations and maintenance (O&M) was conducted for an FM organization in 2017. Approximately 700 respondents in the United States completed the survey, and the responses were analyzed to examine the use of customer/occupant satisfaction surveys in the nation's FM industry. The results indicate that two-thirds of the industry uses these surveys at varying frequencies; the frequency differs somewhat according to the size of the facility in Rentable Square Feet (RSF), as there is a positive linear correlation between RSF and survey frequency. Future research on the use of these surveys as a competitive benchmarking tool needs to focus on standardizing these surveys to enable more equitable comparisons and engaging in in-depth interviews to evaluate the process by which FM departments manage their occupant satisfaction for continual improvement.