Developing an ethos of continual improvement – are you giving your customers what they want…

It is so important to learn from feedback and build in continuous improvement particularly around your product and customer service, you will only keep your customers by meeting their expectations, but do you know if you are meeting there expectation, do customers come back and tell you what a good job you have done….not very often in my experience, but they are quick to let you know how bad something is.

Complaints

Make sure you keep a log of your complaints and compliments so you can periodically do a root cause and see what didn’t work and how you can rectify it. Ensure that you have say 5 reasons for complaints and factor as much as possible into these to help you see root causes, ensuring any management information you keep is at a high enough level to be meaningful, but can be drilled into for the detail.

Net Promoter Score
Consider whether the net promoter score, NPS is relevant to your business will it help grow awareness. NPS is the growing method for measuring customer satisfaction and has been touted as one the most important metrics for business:-
It is Feedback is generated from less than 2 very straight forward questions, meaning limited impact to customers, but making them feel valued, increasing the chance of them coming back.
Net promoter works on feedback relating to likelihood to recommend a business to a collegue or peer, it then looks at the % that would less the % that wouldn’t to give an overall score which can range from -100 to +100.

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys are a great way to learn what is or isn’t working and rectify it again making sure you record and track the outputs. Keep your questions simple and be clear as to which end of the scale is excellent and poor when using a numerical response, also give people chance to leave comments, it give you more to go from. When you make a change based on this feedback tell people about it, include in your promotional material ‘we listened to you and changed X’. This shows customers old and new that you do care.

When working with your customers remember, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs has promoted the fact that news of bad customer service reaches twice as many people as good customer service.

Keep on the continual improvement, and for more top tips visit our videos page….