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The Five Keys to Improving Customer Satisfaction

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Less than two weeks ago I was privileged to participate in Vovici’s Vision conference, where more than 200 Vovici customers, partners, employees and industry speakers came together to discuss best practices for Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Employee and overall enterprise feedback management.

While much of what I do is virtual due to cost and time constraints, there is a particular connection that can only be formed in a face to face meeting.  At this year’s Vision conference it was brought home to me the power of connecting with people face to face.  For those of you who attended, I’d like to extend my thanks for making the effort to do so. For those of you who didn’t have the opportunity to participate in person, I thought I’d recap my presentation on the Five Keys to Improving Customer Satisfaction. 

As I do, it’s important to keep in mind the reason that we measure satisfaction: to understand the factors that drive customer loyalty.  Loyalty is that elusive quality that we all seek because it means that customers will continue to come back despite having a bad experience or less than satisfying interaction. Loyalty is the key to business growth because it means you can grow faster and at less expense than your competitors because you’re not constantly struggling to stanch the flow of customers out the door. Trying to grow your business without building loyalty is like trying to fill a bathtub with the drain open – you can do it, but it takes a tremendous amount of input and it doesn’t last very long. 

So what are the keys to building loyal customers? I’ve identified five based on Vovici’s interactions with customers and our work with leading brands around the globe.

1.        Create a formal Customer Feedback Program

   The old adage “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” applies to many organizations because they lack a coordinated program to gain customer feedback. By empowering individual departments and business units to collect their own data in an uncoordinated fashion, many organizations lose the value of the data they gather by over-surveying some populations, obtaining data that can’t be compared and used, and not having an overall commitment to using customer data.

2.        Measure Customer Satisfaction using a mix of internal metrics and customer viewpoints

   While loyalty is the ultimate goal, customer satisfaction is table stakes in this process. But in too many cases customer satisfaction surveys are created only from the vendor’s perspective. We all need to measure internal metrics like first call resolution time, the speed of product delivery and the professionalism of staff members.  But the most successful organizations also ask the customer what’s important to them in the relationship and then measure their satisfaction with those elements. By examining the gap between Importance and Satisfaction from the customer’s perspective, organizations can gain better insights into what is causing friction in customer relationships and then take steps to address them.

3.         Respect your customer by using known data in your feedback program

   Most organizations already have a wealth of information about their customers that should be used in the survey process to drive engagement and loyalty. Unfortunately, most of the customer satisfaction surveys that we all receive reflect none of the knowledge that we have of the relationship with the vendor.  How many times are you asked to answer such questions as: “Which of our products do you own?” or “How long have you been a customer?” or better yet, “When is the last time your called our Help Desk?”.  Most organizations already know the answers to these questions and could easily embed it behind the scenes to perform what Don Peppers (one of our keynote speakers at Vision) refers to as “invisible customization.” By using known data in the survey process you can now show customers that you respect their time and are honoring the relationship you have with them by not asking questions to which you already have the answers.  By asking customers 10 highly relevant, targeted questions that reflect your knowledge of the relationship you will get better more insightful answers that you can now use to effect fundamental change to drive loyalty.

4.        Make data actionable and share results and actions with customers, employees and internal groups

   Getting feedback is just part of the process to drive satisfaction and loyalty. Now you MUST act upon it if you’re to move the needle in a positive direction with customer satisfaction and loyalty. Before you conduct a survey ask yourself two very simple questions: 1. “Does the data that I want to collect exist somewhere else (or very simply: Do I need to bother my customers with this request?).  2. “What am I going to do with the data once I get it?”

   If the data you’re about to gather is “nice to have” and won’t be used to drive decisions, actions or programmatic improvements, then you should stop the project.  Once you ask customers for their input you have now created an expectation that you’re going to do something with the data. Your obligation is now to act on the overall data, and very specifically, to understand where there are specific items in customer relationships that if you took action on them very soon, could prevent a customer from walking out the door.  Collect the data – but act on it and let the customer’s know what you’re doing with their input.

5.        Invite customers to provide ongoing feedback as part of a feedback panel.

   In research, randomness is a virtue. In customer feedback -- not so much. 

   While getting feedback from a representative group is important, so too is obtaining feedback from customers on a very consistent basis. And the best way to do that is by forming a customer feedback panel. 

   What is a panel? Think about a panel as a roomful of your customers that you can walk into at any time, ask any question and are guaranteed to get a response. How might you use that?

   Creating a panel can be as simple asking customers to participate.  You’ll be amazed at how many of them want to give you feedback consistently but lack the means to do so. By asking – and obtaining – their permission, you now have the right to interact with them on a regular basis. But with this great power, now comes great responsibility. You must honor the relationship you have with them and ask questions that are relevant to them, and not too often.  In exchange for putting limits on your behavior you’ll actually get more and better data back from them over a period of time. But I’ll cover panel management in more detail in another post.

For now, I encourage you to think about the Five Keys to Customer Satisfaction and how they might apply to your organization.