Thanks to all the customers who gave us feedback in our 2014 client survey.

We love being “an extremely bright and intelligent organisation who add significant value to our business” – but we don’t want to stop there! We’ve compiled the results both positive and negative, and will use these to help understand your needs and improve our business.

4 out of 5 clients rate Hornet’s overall performance as very good or outstanding

Even better, 100% of you said our knowledge and experience were either very good or outstanding.

You gave us the same perfect score for understanding your requirements.

All but one respondent rated us very good or outstanding for customer service and communication.

100% are extremely likely or quite likely to recommend Hornet Group to others

Now that’s something to be pleased about!

It also seems a good time to include a comment from one respondent:

‘a lot of small business is missing out … …for start up companies they may never produce due to the upfront costs…’

So if you know someone who might benefit from using Hornet to get an enterprise off the ground, why not get them to talk to us today?

Feedback on areas to improve

Although no clients rated us ‘poor’, we did receive a couple of ‘satisfactory’ ratings for problem resolution and on-time project completion. Our aim is to get all responses to a ‘good’ or above, so we’ll be looking at how we address these areas in more detail.

Problem resolution

Problems vary from project to project, but there are certain common themes:

  • Delays finding competitive quotations are often related to small order quantities
  • Unsatisfactory samples generally come from factories we are using for the first time. Yet we need to explore new factories all the time to ensure we get the best value for clients, so we have to strike a balance here. We try to build ‘resampling’ time into the project timeline.
    Poor samples can also be a result of missing detail in specifications. Thanks to your feedback, we’ll be paying extra attention to specification, especially when working with new factories, to try and prevent this.
  • Quality issues after sampling are relatively rare, but also complex to resolve. The best solution depends so much on the product, the problem and what is acceptable to the client. We ensure our most senior and experienced staff are available to resolve these.

Problem resolution also requires excellent and proactive communication to prevent ‘blame game’ situations. This is an area of ongoing focus for everyone at Hornet.

On-time project completion

Our experience suggests two main risks to on-time project completion:

  • Problems (such as those listed above) can cause unexpected delay.
  • Clients may have unrealistic deadlines. This is especially true around the Chinese New Year period in February. It’s important to remember not only that China closes down for some weeks, but that on return there is a work backlog, so it takes longer than normal to get responses.

Our goal with each project is to look at factors including the product (complexity, quantity); the level of experience we have with the factory; the time of year, and the client’s deadline. We use these to build an expected project timeline which we can track and communicate against. While we cannot control everything, we can at least help you avoid unrealistic expectations, then give you as much notice as possible if delays look likely.

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Hornet will be running another client survey in 2015, but if you have feedback for us, please don’t wait till then. Either talk to your project manager directly or contact us via our webform or email.

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