Customer satisfaction surveys for Royal College of Physicians
Customer satisfaction surveys had a powerful effect on the Royal College of Physicians
Who are the Royal College of Physicians?
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) are the United Kingdom’s governing body of physicians, representing more than 35,000 doctors across the globe. It was established by Royal Charter during the reign of King Henry VIII. The RCP provide physicians with accreditation by examination and a vast amount of educational opportunities to meet members’ Continuing Professional Development requirements.
The challenges
In 2017, the RCP engaged a specialist consultancy, Create4, to develop a corporate partnership programme. This was a broad commercial initiative whose goal was to create long-standing partnerships. The initial focus was to secure sponsors for upcoming events, including: their annual conference Medicine 2017, their 500-year anniversary in 2018 and their landmark conference Innovation in Medicine 2018.
Create4 began by conducting a focus group with RCP members to gain feedback on a number of topics, particularly their opinions on the RCP events they had attended. Create4 quickly established that email, the principal channel used for member communication, was not the preferred channel. Unfortunately, the RCP had insufficient internal resources to engage members by phone.
Our solution
We were brought on to engage with the broader membership. The calls were positioned as promotion for RCP’s 2017 Manchester conference, but the goal was to gather insight and feedback on how members felt about conferences provided for them.
We worked with Create4 to develop an approach and a series of survey questions to glean what the membership wanted from an RCP conference. The questions were built into a bespoke application in our Quick Base relationship management system so we could collate the answers, then easily aggregate and analyse the results. We configured the app so that anecdotal feedback would be anonymised.
We segmented the data to maximise the impact of our calls and tagged it so we could identify trends against different membership categories, e.g., members, fellows, students and retired members.
The results
We reached out to 1500 members and connected with 723. Thirty percent of those we reached were unaware of the date and location of the 2017 conference and requested literature. An additional 30% asked for booking forms. Members also shared feedback on their conference preferences.
We talked with 154 members who were negative about RCP conferences, so we asked detailed questions to establish the factors influencing their attitudes.
All the feedback, positive and negative, was presented back to the RCP in a detailed report containing anecdotal results, metrics and actionable insights.
Conference bookings increased as a result of the additional awareness we created and we were delighted to be contracted to provide a range of further engagement services for the Royal College of Physicians in 2018.