One question that came up recently during my mid-year review is how am I measuring customer satisfaction with the products that I work on? For example, how can I measurably demonstrate that customers are happy with the work we are doing on ASP.NET MVC and that my team is responding to customer feedback?

Umm, I can’t?

At least not right now in a measurable manner. I don’t have any such metric and I’m not sure how reliable any metric I might come up with will be.

ruler

But perhaps that’s simply due to a lack of imagination on my part.

In the past, we’ve tried various unscientific online twitter polls. One thing we did was ask the world for a list of ASP.NET pain points and compile them into one big list. Then at the end of the product cycle, we could show that we were able to address 10% of those pain points.

Personally, I feel that’s a bit contrived, but if it satisfies the muckety mucks, it works for me. ;)

Well actually, I’m not satisfied with that. At least not until I’ve tried to come up with something better. So I started thinking about what are ways to measure this and apart from simply using SurveyMonkey, I’ve sort of hit a wall.

This is where I ask you the question. If you were in my shoes what would you do? How have you quantitatively measured your effectiveness in responding to customer input? I’d love to hear your ideas.

UPDATE 2/4 1:06 AM By the way, I didn’t mean to give the impression that this is the only metric I need to collect. This is just the one I need help with. I think the number of downloads, installations, and clients is a much more important metric. However, some of those numbers are hard to collect with any accuracy. That’s why I think some of these other metrics might be useful as corroborating evidence. At least that’s my theory.