A practical guide to measuring customer satisfaction
INCREASE PROFITSTHROUGH FEEDBACK
1
Each week, Garrett Smith contacts
customers personally to see how their
purchase experience went, if their
products have been installed correctly,
and also to understand if there are
opportunities to earn new business. As
the CMO of VoIPSupply.com, he finds it
essential to engage one on one with
customers.
KISSmetrics, an analytics platform,
makes sure everyone in the company
routinely talks directly to customers.
According to their blog, customers like
hearing from someone besides a
“customer service rep.” Some people
like talking to the CEO, an engineer, or
a marketing person. Each worker can
give their own perspective.
Superior customer service is not a
“we’ll get there someday” goal. It is
something that each and every
business can provide immediately. As
we’ll explore in this short ebook,
customer satisfaction is the path to
increased profits.
Bain & Company studies have shown that a 5% increase in customer retention canincrease a company’s profitability by 75%.
According to an American Express survey, 7 in 10 Americans said they werewilling to spend more with companies they believe provide excellentcustomer service.
“Customer service shouldn’tjust be a department; it should be the entire company.”
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
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WHAT YOU WILL GET OUT OF THIS EBOOK
Two concise steps to increase profits through
customer feedback. You will learn that:
1. Listening well matters; interacting with customers
will help you form deeper relationships, increase
loyalty and promote your brand & identity.
2. Asking for specific feedback will help you find out
what your customers care about most: quality,
support, performance, price, etc. and give you
actionable items to improve your product and
operations to give them what they want. Gathering
feedback, and acting on it, is one of the keys to
achieving superior customer service.
On the first point, listening seems obvious, but doing
so
takes time. We’ll talk about how today’s tools for
listening, monitoring, and tracking what is said about
your company make it a lot easier, less time-
consuming, than ever before.
On the second point, we want to make it clear that
customer
satisfaction is not an intangible, indirect path to
revenue. When you create a customer satisfaction
process, your profits will increase directly because:
• You will catch people, your customers, before they
fall through some proverbial crack in your sales
cycle or customer service process.
• Your team will uncover functional areas, problem
spots, where you can improve.
• When you listen to what a customer says, you find
ways to properly up sell, cross-sell new products
and services. More importantly, you build a
relationship with your customer that allows them to
affect your business in new ways.
VoIPSupply.com sends out a survey each year to all
customers to understand what the customer feels they
do well, what areas they need to improve upon, and
how likely they are to recommend, refer and return as
a customer. The company sees this feedback as
mission critical. That’s not just a catchy marketing
phrase, but a way to ensure that customers return.
When customers return, profits increase.
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WHAT DO THOSE TWO ITEMS REALLY MEAN?
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LISTENING MATTERS: MEASURING CUSTOMERSATISFACTION IN A MOBILE / SOCIAL WORLD
24%Customer service experiences have a deep impact: 24% continue to seek out vendors two or more years after a good experience.Dimensional Research, April 2013
Customer service is rapidly changing because of social
media. With these changes, however, come advanced
tools that allow you to monitor and track what
customers are saying. Customers expect that you are
listening, and more so, participating in social media.
“Social Listening” is important and is a new aspect of
the customer service platform.
In fact, this desire to be heard and listened to extends
to surveys in a surprising way. The Harvard Business
Review
reported on a field study of 2,000-plus financial
services customers where 945 customers
participated in a survey and a control group of 1,064
that did not take the survey. After the survey, neither
group was contacted for one year.
“A year after the survey was conducted, the
customers we surveyed were more than three times
as likely to have opened new accounts, were less
than half as likely to have defected, and were more
profitable than the customers
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People want this level of engagement from the companies with which they do business… even the best of what formerly passed for good customer service is no longer enough. You have to be no less than a customer concierge, doing everything you can to make every one of your customers feel acknowledged, appreciated, and heard.
You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were. Social media gives businesses the tools to do that for the first time in a scalable way.
Gary Vaynerchuk Author of The Thank You Economy
“Gartner predicts that by 2014, refusing to communicate by social media will be as harmful to companies as ignoring phone calls or emails is today”
Gartner 2012
who hadn’t been surveyed. These differences reached
their maximum levels several months after the survey
was done and persisted throughout the year. Even at
the end of the year, surveyed customers continued to
open new accounts at a faster rate and defect at a
slower rate than the people in the control group.”-Drs.
Paul M. Dholakia and Vicki G. Morwitz in the Harvard
Business Review-
One can conclude that customers simply want to know
that you care. They want to know that you are listening.
Social media may be changing customer service, but it
is not changing human behavior: People want to know
you are listening and acting on their concerns,
requests, and feedback. As the Harvard Business
Review highlighted, the mere presence of a survey
changed customer behavior. HOOTSUITE, TELLAGENCE, AND YELP…
There are many tools to help you listen and monitor
today’s social stream. No one tool does it all, so it’s best
to have several: HootSuite or Tweetdeck, to listen and
monitor on social media. You’ll want to consider tools
like LittleBird or Tellagence to help you determine who
to listen to (LittleBird) and how to extract context or
meaning from social media posts (Tellagence).
Finally, despite many business owners who despise Yelp
or another citizen review site, these communities are
here to stay and one needs to maintain keeping up with
those sites. Links provided in the resource section at the
end of this ebook.
So, can “social media listening” to the customer
increase
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profits? Take a look at just two results from the
Aberdeen Group 2012 study called Social Media and
Customer Service: From Listening to Engagement:
• 36% have won back a customer due to a positive
support experience on social media.
• 33% of organizations indicate that positive
mentions on social channels have driven new
business.
On the flip side, this same study found that 17% of
organizations have lost a customer due to a negative
experience on social media.
Google Analytics provides some insight into social
platforms that drive traffic to your website, but it
doesn’t specialize in helping you understand the
conversation. It also does not help you on a real-time
basis as some of these other tools (HootSuite). Still, it
is an important tool to use to know where your
website visitors are coming from and their platform
auto-tags the source of traffic, such as, Twitter or
Facebook.
There is an interesting layer beneath the surface of
social
media and it comes via analytics tools that study the
specific data stream from Twitter, Facebook, and
LinkedIn. Tellagence works mostly with Twitter data
and helps you figure out the context or user intent
from keywords you are interested in. Most of the
listening platforms allow you to search for keywords,
but Tellagence is building analytical algorithms on
top of the data that help you make sense of it. You
can do some of this sort of analysis manually, of
course.
Yelp and other customer review sites can be a
sensitive subject with many owners in the camp that
“Yelp is the enemy.” Our goal is not to comment on
that, but simply to recommend you consider it as a
social channel, monitor it, and try to do a similar
level of customer service so that you can generate
new business from it as well as to retain existing
satisfied customers.
In social media, the key takeaway is that you have to
use any and all channels to keep the conversation
going. Weave survey landing pages into your social
media responses, when appropriate and relevant.
Ask for feedback so that you can learn more about
what your customer wants and needs.
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In a recent Oracle survey, 51 percent of executives
reported that they use customer satisfaction scores to
measure the overall customer experience. They report
accomplishing this by investing in analytics tools to
better understand the customer (survey published
May 2013). Oracle also found that almost 25 percent
of executives cite technology obstacles as the biggest
hurdle to overcome. One of them includes “an inability
to track performance and customer feedback.”
THE ART & SCIENCE OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
That’s what research firm, Forrester, reported on how
Barclaycard helped employees who did not interact
directly with customers.
Non-customer-facing employees at Barclaycard “didn’t
have a clear idea of what customers were calling or
emailing about.” Forrester initiated what they call
“Voice of Customer” to get critical customer
information in front of employees. They started a “daily
listening program” to share a randomly
chosen customer interaction via voicemail to all
employees. The customer feedback has driven a more
customer-centric culture, which has helped increase up-
sell and cross-sell efforts, that stays focused on solving
a customer’s problem.
STARTING THE DAY WITH AN ACTUALCUSTOMER’S VOICE
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Barclaycard cut customer complaints in half and reduced
customer churn by almost one third. They expect these
improvements to deliver $10 million in annual benefit –
fueling a 35 percent gain in profits, according to the
report. Not bad for a customer satisfaction project. Sure,
this is an enterprise-level example, but the same
process and success can be achieved by a small or mid-
sized business with today’s affordable web-based tools.
With satisfaction as a top priority, many marketing and
sales teams are often in the same boat as Barclaycard –
trying to figure out what the customer wants. One of the
best ways to do that is with a survey, but listen to what
Sarah Robinson, author of the book Fierce Loyalty, has to
say about it:
“Surveys are tricky. They have to be executed
exceptionally well…
THE RESULT OF LISTENING TO THE CUSTOMER?
I like seeing companies make it really personal rather than
a huge blanket mail out. Some even issue invitations to be
part of a special team.”
Sarah’s comment reminds us that if you are just beginning
a business conversation with a customer or prospect that
it is super important to keep your surveys short. There’s a
time and a place for a longer survey type conversation,
with the right customer at the right time – but do that
when the relationship is strong.
As we will continue to explore, you have to do more than
tune in to social media. You have to also solicit direct
feedback. In many cases, it is preferable to catch someone
that is about to give unsolicited feedback in social media
and drive them to a page on your website where they can
leave feedback or into a live chat environment where you
are handling the issue in private.
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Customer satisfaction is a rapidly rising and high-ranking corporate priority: 8 out of 10 organizations reported that customer satisfaction is a top-three business issue. In multiple studies dating back to 2005, executives surveyed said that improving the customer experience is one of their top three priorities in the coming years. And 97% said they believe that delivering a great experience is critical to their business results (e.g. increasing customer satisfaction will increase profits).
The earlier-mentioned Oracle study highlighted how
internal hurdles are created, partly by entrenched
company cultures that lose sight of serving the
customer, and that these hurdles block people and
processes from working together. In the Barclaycard
example, it is possible to shift culture by making
customer satisfaction and service a top priority. Not
just lip service, but a top priority.
There is no point asking customers about a particular
service or product if it won’t or can’t be changed,
regardless of the feedback. Customer satisfaction
surveys take time, effort, and company resources.
Thoughtful effort will yield relevant and important
information.
Before starting any customer satisfaction survey,
you will
GATHERING CUSTOMER FEEDBACK: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
want to answer these questions for your own internal
process improvement:
1. What are the goals for the survey?
2. What / how / where will this be measured?
3. How will the results be acted upon?
General questions are not that helpful in customer
satisfaction measurement, at least not without other
more specific questions attached. Without the right
tools, designing an effective customer satisfaction
survey is more difficult than it might appear. It requires
more than just writing a few questions, designing a
questionnaire, calling or mailing some customers, and
then tallying the results. As we’ll see in this section,
understanding customer satisfaction involves
determining what you want to measure.
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The real focus should be on the most important metrics
to cover:
OVERALL SATISFACTION
This measurement it self-explanatory – you are seeking
to measure in a general way: “Overall how satisfied are
you with our company?”
ATTRIBUTE-BASED SATISFACTION
With this type of measurement, you are looking into the
past to understand specific variables: “How satisfied
are you with the quality of the service you received,”
for instance.
Other examples explore attributes, such as:
ATTRIBUTES RELATED TO THE PRODUCT• Product quality• Product benefits
THREE MEASURES OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
ATTRIBUTES RELATED TO SERVICE• Guarantee or warranty• Delivery
ATTRIBUTES RELATED TO PURCHASE (OR
TRANSACTIONS)• Courtesy• Communication
LOYALTY
Loyalty is our third category of satisfaction metrics and
is forward-looking. It seeks to understand what a
customer is planning to do or might do. There are a
number of loyalty questions you can ask, here are a
couple of examples:• Do you plan to purchase from us again? • How likely are you to switch to another provider?
But one of the best-known loyalty metrics is the Net
Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Bain & Co.
Consultant Frederick F. Reichheld. The Net Promoter
Score question is: “How likely are you to recommend
Company/Product to your friend/colleague?”
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NPS basically involves asking respondents to respond
on a 0 -to- 10 point rating scale question - “How likely
are you to recommend Company/Product to your
friend/colleague?” - The scale is then divided into
three sections:• Promoter - Users who gave a 9 or a 10• Passive - Users who gave a 7 or 8• Detractor - Users who gave a score between 0
and 6
Most survey tools will then calculate the aggregate
responses of each of the three categories as well as
the “Net Promoter” -- i.e. Promoters minus the
Detractors.
There are pros and cons to asking only this question–
the main pro is you get a solid reality check that you
have earned some level of trust and appreciation that
demonstrates that a customer will recommend you to
someone else.
The con aspect is that you only have a simple answer
– the “net” responses to just one question: would
they
HOW DOES NPS WORK? recommend. There are no details as to why or what
happened to inspire it, or what worked or didn’t work in
your sales and service efforts. The customer simply
states they would refer you to a friend or family
member. That’s it.
COLLECTING FEEDBACK ANYTIME, ANYWHERE
Just a few short years ago it was enough to simply send
an email survey to your customers and let the responses
roll in. While email is still an important vehicle for
gathering customer feedback, it is no longer sufficient to
solely rely on email. In today’s mobile social world you
need to be equipped to capture customer feedback
anytime, anywhere. This includes:• Web• Email• Social Networks• QR codes• Point-of-sale: kiosks, links on receipts, hang tags• Field surveys and customer intercepts• And last but not least: Mobile, mobile, mobile…
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According to Survey Practice, an e-journal resource for the survey community, “Survey respondents are increasingly attempting to take surveys on their mobile devices, whether researchers intend for this or not.”
Mobile is becoming the dominant way for people to
access the internet. Careful consideration should be
made for how your feedback will be accessed on
mobile devices using multiple methods to access the
web.
Your customers are using tablets, smartphones, Google
Glass
THE RISE OF MOBILE connecting through Wi-Fi, native mobile apps, mobile
browsers and more. No doubt, you have seen or read
about Facebook or online promotions that encourage
users to play a game or enter a contest – these
methods, often called gamification, are meant to make
a survey more interesting and fun. The goal is to make
sharing information painless.
For example, in an Entrepreneur article, Nike+ is
successful in a combination of mobile and Facebook
app “where users could set running goals, earn
rewards for reaching milestones and get
congratulatory messages from world-renown athletes.”
The magazine reported that Nike+ membership
increased by 40 percent. Most importantly, as this
ebook points out, the company attributed a 30 percent
boost in revenue, in that product category, to the
effort.
Starbucks does a great job on their in-store mobile
survey promotion. They use point-of-sale staff to ask if
“you would like to save $1.00 off your next drink.”
They then explain how your receipt has the link to a
web survey which gives you a code upon completion
for that $1.00 savings. Nearly every major retail brand
does this today: Home Depot, Rite Aid, and Safeway,
just to name a few. The cost to do so is incredibly low
and you’ll get helpful data in the process.
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41%of consumers expect an email response within six hours. Only 36% of retailers responded that quickly. --Forrester Research Inc, 2008
One point-of-sale survey method is to provide a QR or
barcode on the receipt, which the customer can scan
with their smartphone. Rather than have them type in a
long survey link, they can simply scan with whatever
app they use.
As a quick aside, if you are going to use a barcode or QR
code to present your survey, make sure that landing
page is something you can keep active later. You don’t
know how long a code like that can float around the
internet and it gives you an opportunity to connect with
someone long after your survey is complete. Don’t let
your QR codes lead prospects to dead webpages. Why
waste an opportunity to redirect someone to your main
website if they reach an inactive survey?
TAKING ACTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND SURVEYRESPONSES IN A TIMELY FASHION
Regardless of what you are measuring, you will want to
plan for how you will respond. The Forrester statistic
about a “six hour email response is expected” is five
years old. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks
were really just coming into the mainstream and getting
useful as customer service channels. As you see in the
second quote, Social Media Today found
36%
of businesses using social media for customer service believe customers expect an answer in one hour or less.
that 36.3 percent of surveyed companies expect that
customers expect a response in an hour or less. 32.5
percent believed responding within one day is
acceptable.
The main lesson here is to make sure that the social and
survey platforms you use have tools to alert you when
someone comments, or shares something on social
media, or completes a survey. You want an action alert
that is built-in to the technology.
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As we opened with and learned from VoIPSupply.com,
their work seems like an ideal place to conclude. They
learned some painful facts in one of their annual
surveys: Their returns policy and return procedure was
broken. Customers found it difficult to understand when
they wanted to return an item.
What did VoIPSupply.com do? They listened to their
customers and solved the problem. They streamlined the
return process and created a new online service platform
to make it simpler and easier for the customer. Each
week, Garrett Smith contacts customers personally. Each
week, he gains incremental, but important, knowledge
that helps him provide a superior customer experience.
Without surveying their customers, they would miss out
on opportunities to fix challenging areas of their
operation that drive direct revenue and profits.
In this ebook, we built a case for leveraging new web
tools that allow you to listen to your customers and to
solicit direct feedback from them. In the process, we can
build stronger
CONCLUSION
relationships with our customers, promote our brands,
and
increase profits. Yes, the foundation requires superior
customer service, but regular communication helps
you to provide that top level of service and keep
customers happy.
The UK Institute of Customer Service found that organizations can increase profits by streamlining the customer experience process. Solving a problem within 24 hours has an average cost of $4.70. Solving a problem a month later has an average cost of $23.50.
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RESOURCES CITED IN TEXT:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/expectations-and-customer-service/
http://community.bmo.com/smartstepsforbusiness/articles/surprise-and-delight-your-way-customer-loyalty
QuestionPro provides a useful
resource page to help you build
multiple choice questions:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/116.html
Social media tools:
http://www.hootsuite.com
http://www.tweetdeck.com
http://getlittlebird.com
http://tellagence.com
IMPLEMENT A CUSTOMER FEEDBACK MEASUREMENT STRATEGY IN 30
MINUTES
In order to apply what we’ve learned, here are 3 action items to kick
off your new customer satisfaction process (following these 3 steps
should take about 30 minutes):
1. Plug-in to your social channels.
Update your social profiles and make at least one post on each,
and schedule time for this on your calendar (for example if you’re
not currently posting, set aside 30 minutes twice per week to
come up with posts and send them out).
2. Ask for feedback.
Setting up a customer satisfaction survey takes only a few
minutes. If you don’t already have a survey provider, go to
www.questionpro.com.
3. Make your survey as accessible as possible.
When selecting a survey platform, be sure they provide easy
access to all possible delivery mediums: web, mobile, offline
electronic submissions, QR codes, email, customizable URLs or
embedding in a website, social sharing, etc.
QUICK START GUIDE
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TJ McCue consults on content strategy for technology
companies and produces web content for entrepreneurs
and business owners.
Currently he writes for Forbes, Small Business Trends
and Yahoo! SMB.
In the past, he has put pen to paper for the Wall Street
Journal, Make, Sports Afield, the Pittsburgh Business
Times and many others. He is passionate about
technology and works to serve tech businesses and
startups.
You can reach him on email, circle TJ McCue on Google+,
or follow him on Twitter.
About the eBook Sponsors
With over 2.7 million users across 100 countries, we are a
leading provider of online survey software that allows our
users to generate the insights they need to make better
business decisions. Our software includes not only tools for
creation, distribution, and analysis of surveys, but also
provides a platform for polling and forms, tablet &
smartphone-based mobile research, and mobile data
reporting & visualization. We have provided reliable and
innovative technology to Fortune 100 companies,
academic institutions, small businesses, and individual DIY
researchers for over ten years.
QuestionPro aims to give you the best tools possible for
collecting and analyzing your data, and with live support
24 hours a day, we're always here for you. Customer
satisfaction is our top priority, and we take your feedback
to heart. Conducting research should be interactive, easy,
and dare we say it, fun.
17
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