Collecting feedback from the field can help you grow your profits and expand your overall top line revenue. The best performing businesses create long term value from their customer relationships. Here are several ways you can incorprate customer feedback to improve your business and profits.
Posting reviews and ratings on line
Google and other search tools can help you magnify your customer feedback to get noticed by other buyers. Getting more reviews from clients is a simple way to boost your online presence and make it easier to be ‘found’ when consumers are looking for the services you provide. When looking to collect more reviews you should consider:
Being able to request feedback quickly and easily from your buyers - if you don’t make it easy to give you feedback, you won’t likely get it.
Consider sending requests to buyers that you are confident will give you strong/positive feedback. Receiving only 5-star reviews isn’t generally reasonable but if you KNOW someone is unhappy or difficult to please, you may consider not sending them directly to online review sites. Consider only sending them an internal request to share with your team.
Where do you want review information posted. Google is the biggest player in the space but you might want to suggest other sites like Yelp, Facebook or even posting them to your own website. GlassHouse can direct your buyers to the platforms they already use. (You can learn more here).
Don’t think of review collection as a ‘one and done’ process. This is something you will want to automate and operationalize to work continuously b/c search tools prefer recent reviews when ranking your business against other competitors.
Training and teaching
How good is your team at the most common jobs they will encounter? How about special cases? Who is struggling with the newest products or pitch? Is anyone over promising or ignoring best practices and procedures? Yes? Maybe? No?
How do you know? If you aren’t asking for feedback, you aren’t going to have much to go on except self reported information from your own team or from the customers who are SO upset that they proactively reach out.
Great teams (in any field) practice the things they are bad at (not just the things they find easy). To understand the biggest opportunities for improvement, your team needs honest feedback from the field.
We suggest a two sided feedback loop that incorporates customer and team member information. That way you are able to identify trends from customers and your internal staff.
Ask your customers for feedback often and put it in front of the team to create training priorities.
Ask your team for feedback and use it to understand where you can improve their working experience and what challenges they face most often.
Happy customers and happy teams make for a successful business.
Happy customers are your best advertising
Happy customers are repeat buyers and walking advertisements.
When thinking about your customers remember that, “You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once”.
If you look at client engagements as one-time jobs, thats what they are likely to be. But if you treat the customer as a long term buyer, you will see the potential for repeat business as well as a way to create small referral ‘nodes’ from every engagement. While you may be able to maximize individual job margins and drive immediate profit, if the customer is ultimately dissatisfied with the service and value, you can cost yourself a lot of long term profit.
Here is a math equation to quantify the value what we call the “happy customer multiplier”.
**DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION TO UNDER CHARGE CUSTOMERS. THIS IS A REMINDER NOT TO LOOK AT THINGS ON A ONE-TIME JOB ONLY BASIS.
The big take away is that happy customers are worth a lot more 'long term' if you can use them to drive additional business. Asking your customers continuously for feedback will help you level up your service and insure that customers are leaving satisfied with the services your team provides.
Aligning team comp with feedback goals
The great Charlie Munger (bilionaire investor) once said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If you want to drive customer feedback and create a culture where that information is used to improve, incentivize your team to collect feedback. Consider paying for reviews and setting overall review performance goals.
A model to consider:
Pay for every review collected to the tech/rep that is represented on the review. Don’t worry about the score, just pay to get them. Get your team trained on a simple process to create feedback loops even if the information is only used internally. Think of this as the ‘carrot-no-stick’ model.
Pay for an overall performance threshold. If you want 4.4 stars on average, pay them a bonus for hitting that threshold.
For example: If every review is worth $5, you can multiple the amount based on performance above 4.4 stars on as the average. For every 0.1 stars you could increase the multiple of the amount.
At $5 per review, if your tech collects 100 reviews they would have earned $500 in bonus. BUT… if they came in at a perfect 5-star rating, they would receive $500 x 1.7 = $850. Creating incentive to get ALL the reviews and a alignment to improving them over time.
This is just an example. You could increase the amount per rating, you could change the thresholds or adjust the multiples. The point is that if you want to align to customer satisfaction AND feedback, make sure that your team incentives align to those goals.