Enhancing Quality: EPO’s User Satisfaction Surveys 2022/2023

For many years, the European Patent Office (EPO) has been committed to delivering the highest quality services to its stakeholders. To ensure this commitment remains unwavering, the EPO carries out comprehensive User Satisfaction Surveys. These surveys are a vital part of the EPO’s continuous improvement efforts, influencing enhancements throughout the patent granting process.

Since 2015 the EPO has entrusted BERENT to conduct User Satisfaction Surveys on its behalf. This long-standing collaboration stands as a reflection of our reliability and the mutual trust we share with the EPO. On 1 September 2022, we launched the latest series of these surveys, which ran until April 2023. Interviews were carried out by telephone and webform.

The EPO serves a vast international community of patent applicants and stakeholders. To accommodate this diverse user base, interviews were conducted in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Korean.

The surveys encompassed five main areas, providing a comprehensive understanding of user satisfaction across all stages of the patent granting process, user support, and online services.

The results confirm very high user satisfaction levels and show that the percentage of applicants rating EPO’s services as “neither good nor poor”, “good” or “very good” was 94% for search, 93% for examination and 87% for opposition.

More information about EPO’s User Satisfaction Surveys and their results can be found here:

https://www.epo.org/en/service-support/contact-us/surveys

We want to acknowledge and thank all the respondents for their time and valuable contributions to the 2022/2023 surveys, your input is highly appreciated.