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As part of my halftime job at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, I lead up a statistical consulting center. I was thinking that we need to conduct regular surveys of clients to see if they are satisfied with the services we provide. I'm sure there are some other academic consulting centers that do this, and I was hoping that you might share information on how often you survey your clients, what survey forms you use, what attempts, if any, you make to keep the responses anonymous, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

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Stephen Simon
Independent Statistical Consultant
P. Mean Consulting
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Hi Steve,

At LISA (Virginia Tech's Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis) we solicit feedback from ALL clients who requested collaboration through our website request form. We use this feedback to improve our statistical collaboration processes. Every semester I meet with all of the LISA grad students to discuss their client feedback. The qualitative feedback we get is often helpful and we use it to fine-tune our practices. The quantitative feedback is a useful measure of client satisfaction.

We get about a 65% response rate (out of ~350 surveys sent out) from our clients. And more than 97% of the responses are positive. This means that the number of unhappy or dissatisfied clients is so small that I can personally follow up with them. The latest case of this happening was a grad student from engineering who was dissatisfied with her LISA experience this past summer. I contacted her and her advisor to see why the student was dissatisfied. We met, hashed things out, and right now the grad student, her faculty advisor, a new stat LISA grad student, and myself are collaborating on a conference paper together and plan on submitting a co-authored publication before December.

If anyone is interested in the questions we ask, here's a link to a non-live version of our feedback survey: https://virginiatech.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_aXbdDZvwobdNNad

At first, I wanted the feedback to be anonymous. Then I made it clear that putting a name on it was optional. Now I want the client's name but it's not required. We are soliciting real feedback about LISA's statistical collaboration practices and procedures, so we want the client to say their name. Some clients don't write their name for whatever reason and that's fine.

Maybe 90% of the clients continue past the first page of the feedback survey, which is why I don't feel too compelled to cut down on the number of questions.


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Eric Vance
LISA (Virginia Tech's Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis)
Director and Assistant Research Professor
Blacksburg VA, United States
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