| I have a friend who teaches sixth grade Language
Arts. One of the disciplines she teaches is spelling. Each
Monday she writes ten words on the board, turns to her students
and says, “These are the answers to Friday’s test.”
Isn’t school great? You’re told what’s
expected of you. It’s either handed to you or you’re
told exactly where to find it. If you make a mistake, there
is someone there to correct you immediately—someone
who really wants to see you score 100% all the time. The best
thing is, you always know where you stand and how you were
judged. If you want to improve, all you have to do is apply
the lessons that are handed to you.
Why can’t business be that clear? It’s hard
to know where we stand with our customers and why—especially
with our external customers. Why do they buy from us? Just
how loyal are they? What factors are we being judged by? What
changes could we make to strengthen the relationship? How
can we review the answers to the test in advance?
How? Ask. Your customers will tell you,
but unlike in school where it was the teacher’s job
to hand you information, now you have to ask for it. In college
it was an infraction to buy the answers to the test in advance.
In business, it’s smart. Whether you buy with the opportunity
cost of your internal resources or with dollars paid to an
external resource, take the initiative and ask your customers.
During the heyday of TQM, lots of businesses conducted some
form of customer satisfaction surveying. As the bloom fell
off the TQM rose, most companies’ surveying programs
ended. But customers grade you whether you studied for the
test or not.
Ask whom? Well, who is important to you?
The answer will vary based on the kind of business you’re
in. A firm with a relatively small number of customers may
want to ask each account. A firm with a large number of non
consumer accounts may want to ask the accounts that represent
50% to 80% of annual revenue. A firm with a large number of
small commercial or consumer accounts may want to ask a cross-section:
random, selected by key demographic, or selected by buying
pattern.
Ask what? What do you want to know? This
is an important point: There are no rules about what to ask.
Think about what you want to know and how you would use that
information if you had it. Now, ask that. Take care not to
ask for feedback about practices you aren’t going to
change. For example, if you know your billing system is antiquated
but you don’t plan to install a new one in the foreseeable
future, don’t ask for feedback about your billing system.
The reason is, once someone has given you what they consider
to be useful information, they expect you to act on it. This
is especially true if you have gone out of your way to ask
for it.
Ask when? The timing of your survey can
be event-driven, calendar-driven, or spontaneous. Event-driven
is best when you have a distinct cycle of events with your
customers. An example of an event is the initiation of a project
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or project milestones. Product delivery and
product servicing are other events that can drive the timing
of a survey. So can internal strategic planning cycles. Calendar-driven
is best when you have an ongoing relationship with your customers
or a large quantity of transactions over an extended period.
You might choose an annual checkup or a more frequent schedule
if you’re imposing a lot of change on your customers.
Spot checking with spontaneous surveys is useful when you’re
trying to verify the effectiveness of an operational or personnel
change.
Ask how? There are many methods of asking
for feedback. They include written surveys, telephone surveys
or interviews, face-to-face interviews and group meetings,
such as focus groups. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.
Written surveys can be inexpensive, but the response rate
is often low, and the participants are largely self-selected.
Those who don’t want to bother with your survey may
be the people you could learn the most from. A well-designed
telephone survey can give you priceless information from exactly
those you want to hear from, but they can be resource intensive
whether conducted in-house or contracted out. Similarly, well-designed
face-to-face interviews and focus groups can also give you
priceless information, but they are even more resource intensive
if conducted on a large scale. (Retailers usually overlook
telephone and face-to-face interviews. That’s unfortunate.
As retail consumers, we can all think of examples of feedback
we’d be happy to give if the retailer would make it
painless for us.)
Be careful not to make your relationship worse by opening
a can of worms you can’t manage. If you’re conducting
an interactive survey (telephone, face-to-face or focus group),
at the very least be prepared to deliver a noncommittal acknowledgment
that you heard something you weren’t expecting to hear.
People hate to be ignored. If you take their feedback and
fail to address it, you’re in essence saying you don’t
care how they feel. You don’t have to promise to fix
the problem. The customer might just be saying, “Hear
me,” not necessarily, “Obey me.” Of course,
if you can fix the problem, do so!
In short, ask what you want to know of those who have the
information. Time your inquiry to maximize the value of what
you learn. Use a method that delivers the highest return,
and be willing to invest what it takes to ask for the answers
to the test.
Finally, many companies talk about customer satisfaction
surveys, but few actually conduct them. Fewer still conduct
them well and use what they learn. You will stand out by merely
making the effort, and you stand to deepen customer loyalty
by demonstrating that you master each lesson.
This article first appeared in the Spring issue of Tips
From the Top.
Ann Amati, Principal, Deliberate Strategies Consulting,
helps companies in business-to-
business sales increase revenues.
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