Achieving client satisfaction for engineering consulting firms

Client satisfaction, as a very important total quality management philosophy, lately has been incorporated in the 2000 edition of the ISO 9000 quality management system. Senior construction professionals in Hong Kong were interviewed in a two-stage survey to identify a comprehensive list of factors (and their indicators) for measuring client satisfaction in the context of engineering consulting services. From the survey data, the clients' level of satisfaction with those factors and the indicators were prioritized. The resulting list of priorities showed the collective opinion of 47 senior and experienced professionals working in the field on what services provided by consulting firms were the most or least satisfactory in Hong Kong. The data obtained from the 47 professionals were further employed to establish a client satisfaction function using multiple linear regression for deriving strategies for consultants to achieve client satisfaction. The approach of this research is useful to engineering consulting firms, not only in Hong Kong, but also in other places for identifying and improving on their own weak areas to enhance the quality of services for their clients.