Measuring Customer WOW!

How do you measure the satisfaction of your customers? What about their engagement? How likely are your current customers to recommend you to their friends and colleagues?

If you don’t know or you’re currently thinking back to that survey you did last year, keep reading and we’ll show you how to set up a customer service system that is guaranteed to deliver WOW to all of your customers, each and every day.

Who is the most important person on the earth? To your business – that person is your customer. They are the center of your universe. You must know how they feel about you and your brand every time they interact with you or your organization.

Notice that last part – or your organization. It does not matter how close of a finger you keep on the pulse of your organization. Your customers are interacting with your organization when you are not looking, our out of town, or asleep. Customers interact with your people, your website, your phone system, and your night desk clerks. All of these interactions occur without you there.

That is why you must create a fantastic system to measure customer feedback. This system is the only way to truly know how good or bad your customers feel about working with your firm when you are not there.

What makes a great measurement system? 3 things:

  1. Consistency – You must make it easy for your clients to complain to you when they are disappointed and to praise you when they’re happy (though they are much less likely to do the latter). Good service is simply expected and passes with little notice, but get something wrong and your customers will tell everyone who will listen.

    Believe it or not, some firms are still hiding from social media afraid that someone might post something derogatory about them out there. For those few of you still hiding under this predisposition – you’re right. Your upset customers are posting about you online. They are just doing in a countless number of places that you can’t track.

    That is why you must attract your customers to your social media outlets where they can vent and, most importantly, you can respond.

    Surveys and feedback mechanisms are extremely cost effective today. Be asking for feedback from your customers constantly. You’ve got to make it easy for them to respond. Keep surveys short and pay for them if you have to.

    I can’t stand filling out surveys, but Chick-fil-A always gets my feedback when they offer me a free chicken sandwich for taking their survey. Find something that excites your customers and give it away in exchange for their feedback. It will be some of the best money you have ever spent.

  2. Accuracy – Getting the data right is not that difficult. The software and whoever you hire to manage your feedback program will handle that for you. There are two other forms of accuracy that you need to be focused on.

    Who is asking the questions and handling the responses? If your people are in charge of the feedback and you incentivize your team to achieve high rates of customer satisfaction and engagement, you’ll get high scores. They won’t necessarily be accurate, but they’ll be high. You’re right to reward your people for creating great customer experiences, but you need a 3rd party to handle your feedback system if you want accurate data.

    Asking the right question – every time. Pick just a few questions and ask them every time. Use the same rating scale every time. This is the only way to determine whether you are winning or not. I highly recommend the Net Promoter Score, but uniformity is key.

  3. Closing the Loop – If your wife is carrying on a conversation with you and you fail to acknowledge what she has said, how will she respond? Unless your wife just wants to hear herself talk, she probably will respond rather poorly and seek out a better conversational partner at a minimum.

    If you don’t participate in the conversation with your customers, you can expect a similar response. They will go elsewhere or quit answering your questions. You must monitor social media and respond quickly or the conversation can quickly get out of hand (and not in your favor). Just like in a good conversation you must recognize what your customers tell you through your surveys or other feedback mechanisms and respond.

    Starbucks does a great job of this using a software program that allows their card carrying customers to submit ideas for improvements. Once submitted other customers can vote the ideas up or down. Starbucks responds to the ideas that get the most votes and then lets clients know what ideas they have implemented! Why aren’t you doing this for your customers?

Thanks to some amazing advances in technology, gathering, analyzing and responding to your customers input is easier and more cost efficient than ever. There is really no excuse not to be gathering feedback from your customers, analyzing that data and responding.

If you need help, click here to sign up for a free consultation and we’ll create a cost and time effective program to meet your needs.

Thank you for being a part of our values driven community!

Image courtesy of www.planetxeo.com.

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