Measuring client satisfaction with your service is important for so many reasons. It is an important indicator of whether your service is responsive to clients, of how you engage with them, and whether they feel you will meet their needs. In an increasingly market-based sector, client satisfaction is also an important indicator of whether clients will continue to use your service and recommend it to other people. 

In order to measure whether your clients are satisfied with the services you provide you need a way of surveying them that is: 

• easy to design and understand
• replicable so that you can compare results between one period and another; and
• enables clients to give you meaningful feedback.

Here’s a step by step guide on How to measure client satisfaction. 

What do we measure?

Satisfaction is subjective. It can refer to many aspects of a client’s relationship with a service. It could refer to satisfaction with:

• the quality of your service (eg, they might be satisfied with the punctuality or reliability of your service)
• the relationship with a key worker
• the cost attached to a service
• your service delivery meeting or exceeding a client’s expectations
• the outcome of the service interaction (eg, they might be satisfied that they have learned new skills and are better able to deal with certain issues).

When do we measure?

You need to decide when you are going to gather your information. This will depend on how long you work with clients. With short-term work it could be appropriate to survey clients when they finish work with you; if your work is intensive or ongoing it would be useful to gather information at periodic case reviews.

How do we measure it?

The best way to measure client satisfaction is to use survey techniques, and within the survey the best tool to use is a ratings scale.
A common ratings scale to measure client satisfaction is:

For more information on ratings scales, see How to create and use a ratings scale.
You can put your three satisfaction questions together and ask them at once, in a matrix.