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An initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab

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Surveying Your Internal Customers to Identify Their Procurement Pain Points

Peer Roundtable

05.25.2023

| 1:00 pm

- 2:00 pm

EDT

Have you ever wondered whether your customer departments and other internal stakeholders are satisfied with the services and solutions they receive from the Purchasing Office?

A quick internal survey can help answer that question (and many others!). Surveys are powerful mirrors that can reflect how customer departments view working with your Purchasing Office — highlighting both inefficiencies as well as strengths of your team. Regularly conducting surveys as a data-gathering mechanism can broker an exchange of ideas, perceptions, and experiences that can help Purchasing offices operate at an optimal level, provide excellent customer service, recognize star employees, and gather valuable insights about process fixes and pain points to resolve.

During this event we discussed and shared practical ideas for governments to incorporate surveys into their best practices toolkit, including:

  • Gaining buy-in for conducting the survey, bringing your team along, and aligning on roles
  • Designing effective surveys that include actionable questions that will assess customer satisfaction and illuminate pain points
  • Encouraging honest feedback from survey respondents and framing the importance of the survey to respondents
  • Analyzing, sharing, and acting on the survey results
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