ECN NZ Customs satisfaction survey results are in and they are up!

The customer satisfaction rating of the ECN service to the NZ Customs' community of custom brokers, freight forwarders, importers and exporters, increased to 84% (up from 83% in 2008).

Year on Year Results
The total customer satisfaction index (CSI) score for 2009 is slightly up on 2008 and remains within the same high range as those given since 2005.

2009 84% CSI
2008 83% CSI
2007 85% CSI
2006 84% CSI
2005 83% CSI

Areas Measured by the Survey
The survey looks at the key services provided by ECN to the NZ Customs community. These areas are:

Help Desk

After Hours Support

System Availability

Pricing

Billing

Survey Methodology
The survey uses an independent survey company and is sent annually, via email, to all users on the NZ Customs outage alerts list. This year 208 users (out of a universe of 950) filled in the survey.

The questions have been kept the same since 2005 to allow year on year comparison. This years scores, compared to the 2008 survey, were up in 3 sections: Help Desk, System Availability and Billing; unchanged in Pricing and slightly down in After Hours Support.

Users are given a series of statements and can make responses ranging from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”. To calculate overall satisfaction, a numeric value is assigned to each possible answer, with “Strongly Agree” assigned the highest value and “Strongly Disagree” assigned the lowest. Each section is then given a weighting according to their relative importance - e.g. system availability is rated as more important than invoicing. The total score is then rated against 100% of the total possible score (i.e. if everyone “strongly agreed” with every statement then the CSI would be 100%).

NZ Customs Says
Bruce Thomas IT Manager NZ Customs says “NZ Customs has these surveys run once a year to ensure that our clients (the Custom Brokers, Freight Forwarders and direct importers and exporters) are getting a good service that they still enjoy. Running this survey allows us to see what our clients think about specific areas of the ECN service. We can monitor and compare various areas of ECN’s performance and make sure that our users still see value in the service. Results like these suggest that users are generally happy but it’s a bit like a coach after an All Black win... It’s a great result but there are always things to work on”, says Bruce.

Open ended questions
Open ended questions are also used. This allows users to make any comment they like about the service which are then also looked at by ECN and NZ Customs.

Prizes
To ensure participant numbers are large enough for accurate results, ECN use the incentive of a prize draw (this year an 8GBi-pod Nano) which is selected at random. The Winner of the 2009 survey was Paul Riley of Amalgamated Marketing Limited .