I can imagine 99% will say YES right away. But my next question is: “how do you know ? ” The truth is you don’t! or maybe you “kind of ” know because you survey them once or twice a year and look at the social media interactions (for those who use it!)
Do you think this is enough ? Almost every service excellence and CRM guru would tell you that the most successful are those who give the customer what he/she wants, and I totally agree. Problem is how do you know what your customers want ? Do they all want the same thing ? Do they all feel the same way about your service, business or brand? And are you doing enough to listen to them ?
Most companies use outdated or cumbersome methods to collect customer feedback starting with the suggestion box that is never close to a quarter of its capacity and ending with the dreaded telephone survey that takes forever to complete. In this day and age we all want and expect personalized service, we are all becoming “Millennials” in our own right, what I like today is not necessarily what I would like tomorrow and dealing with the service business has many points of contacts with representatives of that business and they are not all the same, so asking me a general question about my perception of that service would hardly give you any idea of what you need to work on and what you are doing well.
Service needs to be personalized, customer feedback should be too, for example: I could like the taste of your coffee but hate the lighting in the store, or maybe I have had a good experience from employee X and a bad one from employee Y. Would you like to have the chance to hear about it first hand and invoke a recovery mechanism or wait 11 months till you get my survey ?
When customers get a bad experience they take on to social media right away, why ? Because they can’t trust that the existing feedback channels that you have provided, will lead to any change (like the call center, or the suggestion / complaint forms etc.) in most cases the damage to the brand is inevitable, even though it can be contained.
It is extremely important to get constant & real personalized feedback from every customer without burdening or boring them too much, it is even more important to act swiftly on that feedback (positive and negative) and create this trust relationship with your customers. As a customer I need to be sure that my feedback is welcomed and actionable in the short term, I don’t want to wait for the call center to escalate to team leader then service manager etc. and by the time someone calls me back it is too late or I had already given up on the company.
Related Posts from HumanTalents blog:
