How to Look at Your Business Through the Eyes of Your Customer

Filed Under Business Development, Business Growth, Marketing Tools, Sales

Regardless of the business you’re in, you can’t improve on the products or service you offer your customers until you know what they like and dislike about what you’re doing now. The good news is that valuable information can be unearthed by asking your customers two simple questions:

How are we doing?

How can we get better?

Finding the answer to those two questions helps you understand:

• The customers perception of the quality of service they are currently receiving from you and,

• What you need to do in order to increase your customers perception value

Relative quality as perceived by customers is the single most important factor in determining long-term profitability. The big dollars earned aren’t gained so much from securing the initial sale but in your ability to keep customers coming back. And you keep them by providing greater levels of quality service as they perceive it.

The Ostrich Syndrome

Michael LeBoeuf in his book How to Win Customers and Keep them for Life, suggests entrepreneurs consider what happens to a business that doesn’t make a regular and systematic effort to ask its customers, “How are we doing?” and, “How can we get better?”

At the very least, you can be sure that it’s losing a lot of repeat business and long-term big dollars. And at the very worst, this brand of ignorance is economic suicide. When it comes to winning and keeping customers, a company without a plan of well-planned system of customer feedback is burying its head in the sand and hoping for the best. And as Dr. Robert Anthony noted, “if you stick your head in the sand, one thing is for sure, you’ll get your rear kicked.” Customer satisfaction is so important that you would think that most businesses would have a well thought out strategy for measuring it and putting this information to work.

But believe it or not, when it comes to customer satisfaction, the overwhelming majority of businesses, from giant corporations to mom and pop operations, are burying their heads in the sand and hoping for the best. Many of these same companies spare no expense when it comes to measuring such things as cash flow, productivity, market share, earnings and net assets. Yet very, very few even try to obtain, measure, or regularly monitor what their customer likes and dislikes about the job they do. It seems ironic that in the information age, most businesses aren’t even trying to obtain, measure, or use some of the most valuable information of all.

Tom Hopkins author of, How to Master The Art Of Selling, agrees with this philosophy but says few companies actually track these metrics and if they do they don’t know what to do with this information.

Service Quality Can be Measured

For better or worse your customers have an opinion about the quality of service that you offer and collecting, gathering, and measuring these opinions on a regular basis provides the crucial information you need to keep them buying, multiplying, and coming back. And it’s not an impossible task, a number of companies have been doing it for quite some time and many more will be doing so in the future.

Each program needs to be tailored to address the specific needs of each business. For example if you own a small business with just a few customers, regularly ask your customers relevant satisfaction questions, write down their answers and look for themes. A larger organization will need to apply a more structured approach.

Measurement Tools

1. Construct a brief survey – Distribute a survey containing important questions about specific aspects of your service and ask your customer to rate your company from one to five or one to ten on each question. Then add space for the customer to tell you what he is thinking in his own words.

2. Survey your customer by telephone – Although this is a more expensive option, telephone surveys will give you the most accurate picture. It takes a little of the customer’s time, but you can ask more questions, and it provides a more random sample. Results from written surveys can be skewed because the most common respondents are customers who strongly like or dislike their experiences with your company.

Here are some questions that you may want to consider using:

• How well do we deliver what we promise?
• How often do we do things right the first time?
• How often do we do things right on time?
• How quickly do we respond to your requests for service?
• How assessable are we when you need to contact us?
• How helpful and polite are we?
• How well do we speak your language?
• How well do we listen to you?
• How hard do you think we work at keeping you a satisfied customer?
• How much confidence do you have in our products or services?
• How well do we understand and try to meet your special needs or requests?
• Overall, how would you rate the appearance of our facilities, products, communications and people?
• Overall, how would you rate the quality of our service?
• Overall, how would you rate the quality of your competitor’s service?
• How willing would you be to recommend us?
• How willing would you be to buy from us again?

The more you can modify these questions to make them applicable to you specific business, the more valuable the answers you receive will be.

Be sure to include open-ended questions in your list. Ratings scale questions like the ones listed are a basis for measurement, they may not give you the valuable information you need to hear from your customer in his own words.

Some examples of good open-ended questions are:

• Are we doing or not doing anything that bugs you?
• What do you like best about what we do?
• How can we better serve you?
• What parts of our service are most important to you?

Be careful with the last question because what customers say is most important may not be what causes them to buy. Example airline passengers say safety is most important to them but doesn’t influence who they choose as a carrier because they perceive all airlines to be safe.

3. Get feedback from you ex-customers

When customers quit you need to know why they quit and what you can do to win them back. You should send them a quick comment card. if you know then phone them personally.

4. Once you start getting information, put it to work - Get to work on correcting perceived weaknesses and capitalize on perceived strengths. Make a list of problem areas and rank order the list in order of most important. Alert everyone to the problem and get input from the group on how to resolve the problem. Follow-up with the customers to let them know what steps were taken to resolve the problem.

5. Keep on asking and improving - All the answers you need will not be uncovered in one survey. You need a continuous survey process to uncover issues continuously. This will also allow you to track the success of your efforts and the evolution of your business over time.

Everything changes, including customer’s perception of your service. Businesses that are smart enough to keep asking, adapting, and improving in accordance with what the customer thinks, will have the inside track to long term prosperity.

Technorati Tags: Business Development, Marketing, Sales

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