External customers are defined as those outside the organization including, but not limited to, the general public. The interesting thing about obtaining their feedback as a performance indicator is that employees are often stunned by the results. Anyone who has cringed at an episode of Hotel Hell can understand the typical reaction at being told that your cherished product and white glove service is, in reality, appalling. Equally, little brings a smile to your face like employee evaluation forms saying how your service made someone’s day better.

Active solicitation of customer feedback has historically been limited to comment cards in restaurants or online surveys with extremely low response rates. Fortunately, the paradigm of performance appraisal is shifting to a more holistic approach whereby employees can be evaluated from multiple angles: by their peers, managers, vendors, subordinate staff, and self-assessment, as well as by their clients and customers. This 360 degree feedback can be a more accurate measure of an employee’s performance; after all, a supervisor might only witness a tiny percentage of their employees’ contribution to the team effort compared to the clients he or she deals with all day.

Even if the customer isn’t always right, it’s customers large and small who provide a company’s bottom line. Therefore, customer feedback can round out what could otherwise be a rather self-serving chain of command. It also prevents low-ranking workers from concentrating solely on satisfying the people who directly control their working conditions (think of the stereotypical DMV employee with a long lineup in front of them, chatting chummily at the coffee machine with their manager). Customer employee evaluation forms can:

Customers should not be asked to evaluate a single employee’s performance except in situations where they dealt with a single front-line employee, but rather their overall experience with the team. Now that you have designed employee evaluation forms that deal with the organization or unit as a whole, what specific types of questions should you, the HR manager, ask the customer?

Ultimately, feedback coming from external sources is just as important as internal feedback. As long as 360 degree feedback is combined with a professional delivery process to prevent any confusion or denial of the results, customer feedback is an integral part of the full circle.