In yesterday’s post about surveys, I made a quick reference to the fact that I believe professional service firms should not limit themselves to automated survey systems (emails, survey sites, etc.) but should also gather feedback from their customers in person – either face-to-face or over the phone. Today, I thought I would expand on that idea.
Beginning With The End In Mind
Hopefully, if you are soliciting feedback, you are using it to learn and to take action. In terms of marketing, those actions may be things like:
- Identify what we do well (from the customer’s point of view) and do more of it.
- Alter our current offerings or create new ones to satisfy customer needs
- Change our messaging to better reflect the language of our ideal customers
- Identify factors and discrepancies that contribute to customer success vs sales and work on improving them
- Correct service problems that cause our marketing message to be out of synch with the customer experience.
Getting What You Need
In order effectively implement actions like the ones listed above, you need “actionable intelligence” – insight into your customers’ point of view that you can take action on.
In my experience, it can be difficult for professional service firms to gain this insight from a brief questionnaire or survey. Based on my experience is conducting surveys on behalf of my customers, the “gold nuggets”, the insights that help you take meaningful action, never come from the initial answer to a survey question. They always come from the conversation that follows the initial question.
Is Saying “No” Good Customer Service?
When surveyed about a company’s strengths, a typical response is “good customer service”. Or a survey may ask for a rating related to their customer service. In either case, the information from the survey is not very actionable because you don’t have any insight into why the customer answered the way they did. If a customer rates you a 7.5, what does that mean?
I worked with a customer who sold specialty insurance to brokers. When we drilled down to find out what “good customer service” meant to them one of the things we found out was that hearing “no” quickly was a very important part of their perception of good service. Part of the broker’s job is to find and evaluate policies for their customers. The sooner they heard “no” the sooner they knew they had more shopping to do. Once my customer learned this, they were able to take action. They could make a few tweeks to their procedures to quickly identify applications that would be denied. These changes also allowed them to make turnaround time promises to their “Platinum” customers.
Have The Conversation
Technology gives us lots of was to be more efficient with our time. I don’t mean to suggest that professional service firms shouldn’t use technology to gather customer feedback. I am suggesting that in order to be effective, use technology to supplement, not replace, having conversations with your customers.
