Customers

Our Chairman's Award rewards staff who achieve excellence in customer relationships through exceptional effort and dedication. Our overall 2010 winner is Ahmed Al Mazrui, who has delivered outstanding customer management and development performance in OmanWe strive to make our customers successful. To achieve this, we show strong leadership on professional excellence, knowledge management, research, development and innovation. We engage with industry peers and build partnerships. Our business is underpinned by rigorous management systems.

83% – our overall customer performance score

Mott MacDonald aims to attain a real and sustained improvement in relations with customers and in our response to their needs before, during and after assignments. We set out to exceed customers' expectations. In an increasingly competitive market that means it is essential that we innovate on our projects and within our business to hone our competitive edge and maintain our reputation for delivering outstanding quality.

Around the world we serve customers ranging from national and local governments, health and education authorities, transport operators, industry, utilities, developers, contractors, commercial companies, funding agencies and non-government organisations.

We are committed to developing individual relationships with energy, enthusiasm and an open mind, backed by the desire to work flexibly within that relationship to develop the best solution. We stay closely attuned to all our customers’ varying needs and aspirations, working in partnership to turn their ideas into reality.

Our approach to satisfying our customers endeavours to be creative and proactive as we strive to identify and implement improvements through being person-oriented and flexible. We encourage co-locating teams and devote time to help submit projects for consideration for awards.

Excellence led by example

We are enjoying increasing volumes of repeat business, indicating that we are succeeding in our quest to build relationships enabling us to fully understand our customers’ needs, and that they are pleased with what we deliver for them. The drive to help make our customers successful is led from the top of our organisation.

Each year our 60-strong senior management team meets to review Group strategy and identify ways to further improve the quality of our services and solutions. Year on year we refine our approaches, methods and systems. Our leaders play a central role in cascading initiatives through the business, promoting innovation and best practice, safeguarding quality, protecting against risk and listening to staff's ideas for further improving our business.

Measuring our performance

Seeking customer feedback is an integral component of our Quality, Environment and Safety Management System (QES), aiming for continual improvement. Through QES we have been certified as achieving the ISO 9001:200 quality management standard. Formal customer satisfaction questionnaires are completed at the end of every project.

Customer satisfaction is measured against 13 key performance indicators (KPIs) covering what we do and how we do it. Each year we ask for feedback. In 2008 our customers gave us an overall KPI score of 83%, maintaining a six year record of strong performance. While we are holding our position, our customers tell us that the competition has been gaining ground. We are aware of the need to improve our performance to maintain the lead we have enjoyed.

We hold regular forums for promoting excellence in customer relationship management. These forums – represented by directors – draw on the results of customer satisfaction measurements and facilitate ideas throughout the Group.

Local service, global resources

Our offices worldwide are locally staffed and run, each able to call on the resources and expertise within the Group. This enables us to combine local insight into each client’s needs with global best practice, providing tailored solutions to world class standards.

Our business is supported by continuing investment in communication and knowledge management. We encourage networking between senior staff across the globe and organise regular professional and technical forums. We also hold two major corporate events each year where over 600 representatives meet and exchange knowledge.

Committed to innovation, research and development

We pride ourselves in bringing new thought to all the sectors we work in, finding better ways to solve existing challenges and the means to tackle new ones. We undertake R&D in-house and work with selected universities. However, most of the opportunities we have to conduct research and develop new methods or technologies exist on projects themselves.