• Do you know what your customers see as your strengths and weaknesses?
   
• Are you sure that you truly understand what is important to your customer, other than price?
   
• Do you know where to improve your performance to remain your customers' preferred supplier in the future?

Business in the steel industry and its markets is becoming increasingly complex: companies across the steel supply chain work closer and closer together. More and more activities and projects are conducted jointly by suppliers and clients. In many sectors, business processes of different companies are deeply intertwined, with suppliers often working on-site with the client. In addition, non-core activities are increasingly outsourced to independent companies, creating new supplier/client relationships.

While product quality and price remain very important, customers place increasing emphasis on those skills that qualify a supplier as a suitable long term partner, one who offers the best Total Cost of Usage to the customer. Some of these elements are:

Customer Satisfaction Surveys are an essential tool in identifying which performance criteria are important to your key customers and in measuring how your company scores on these criteria. Of particular interest is, naturally, how you perform in comparison to your main competitors.

SteelConsult is experienced in conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys. We have a proven survey methodology and ready-to-use questionnaires that can be easily tailored to your situation. Owing to our expertise of the steel industry, we are able to ask the right questions to your customer and really understand the customer's message.

In addition, SteelConsult has excellent language capabilities, and can talk to the key executives of your customers in their own language whether it is English, French, Dutch, Spanish, German or Chinese. As a result of our experience and our skills we are able to maximise the results of the survey and minimise the time needed from your customers.

Companies for which our Customer Satisfaction Surveys are particularly useful include:

Suppliers to the steel industry:

• Suppliers of utilities and consumables
• Equipment suppliers
• Contractors (by-products, cleaning, transport, maintenance etc.)

Steel producers, processors and distributors supplying the:

• Automotive industry
• Appliances industry
• Packaging industry
• General manufacturing industries

Experiences from past projects
During past projects, our customer satisfaction surveys generated highly valuable, and sometimes very surprising, feedback on how the customer perceived the performance of its supplier. Our surveys provided insight not only into the priorities and concerns of the customer (except for the price), but also into the supplier's strengths and weaknesses, as well as points of improvements for the future.

In addition, the customer was usually impressed by the fact that its supplier was visibly investing in the improvement of its performance by commissioning an independent, objective survey. Regular customer satisfaction surveys are indispensable to achieve 'continuous improvement', a key performance factor which leading companies increasingly demand from their suppliers.