How Customer Surveys Create Better Customer Service
How do you know you’re providing excellent service? You can’t just go by your gut here. The quality of your customer service is defined by what your customers say about your service. So how do you get that feedback from your customers? How do you measure your customer satisfaction (CSAT)?
Do your customers like you?
Why should you care about customer satisfaction?
New business from word of mouth is the cheapest and most rewarding marketing you can do. Satisfied customers are the best way to reduce attrition. As competition increases, costs decline, and technology gets more standardized, the best way to truly differentiate yourself from the noise is through remarkable customer service. That’s how you create, what Seth Godin calls, your purple cow.
Like most things in business, you can’t improve something if you don’t measure it. Your customer experience is no different.
“What gets measured gets managed.” - Peter Drucker
The lack of focus on customer experience from most MSPs in the industry creates a huge opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition.
"As a result of this pressure to improve the customer experience, many MSPs are devoting more resources to IT/technology roles than sales and marketing. Surprisingly, a full half of those surveyed say they don’t prioritize the customer experience when evaluating their managed-service offerings, and one-quarter don’t measure customer satisfaction at all…. How can you retain customers if you don’t even care enough to see if they’re happy with the way you’re servicing them?"
-- Channel Futures article "New ConnectWise Research Shows MSPs Are Underwater"
The Negative
According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner, businesses only hear from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. So if you hear a lot of negative feedback, it’s probably much worse than you realize, but even if you don’t hear negative feedback, you’re missing a ton of feedback points. This fact is even more relevant when you consider 95% of people who have a negative service experience will share that experience with peers.
Managing negative feedback on your service serves a critical function in protecting your brand reputation and gives you an opportunity to correct any negative points of feedback.
The Positive
On the flip side of customer service feedback, according to RightNow, 86% of people are willing to pay up to 25% more for a service if they have a positive view of the service. A Bain & Company study suggests that just a 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 95% increase in profits. This makes sense when you consider the high client acquisition costs of new clients vs. increasing the lifetime value of a current customer.
Most businesses use surveys to collect feedback from their customers. In the MSP industry companies often use the Connectwise client surveys or Autotask customer surveys. This is a decent first step since some feedback is better than none, but what people find is the number of people that actually complete a customer survey is frustratingly low. Email surveys can give you a 5% completion rate on average. Which simply does not give you enough to work off of? 1-2 surveys a week, will not give you the data you need to find issues, make changes and wow your customers.
Simple is better
What if a simple change to your survey process would allow you to get over 50% survey completion?
A typical customer satisfaction survey is a link that opens a webpage and asks you to complete a multiple choice survey. These are often multiple pages as well. Even if the customer is inclined to click on the link in the first place, over half of those people will bail out before completing the survey. Anything more than one click is asking too much of people.
Using a one-click survey like this one from SimpleSat dramatically increases the likelihood of the customer giving you feedback.
Simple Customer Satisfaction Rating
They don’t need to go anywhere or fill out any forms. They simply click on one of three graphics that visually describe their satisfaction with your company.
This simplicity of interaction reduces the friction between the client giving you feedback by not requiring a lot of time or effort on their part. You don’t need a paragraph of text, you don’t need to score their feedback across 6 different questions. You only need to know the percentage of people that are happy versus unhappy with the service.
Recovery
There is a hidden opportunity in having more negative feedback. After all, you can’t fix a problem you didn’t know existed. SimpleSat has a beautiful dashboard that empowers you to view feedback, customer details, a team member leaderboard and overall satisfaction stats.
This helps you keep the pulse of how people perceive your service. If you get negative (or neutral) feedback, create a workflow that alerts the service manager right away. Reach out to the user and hear them out. Make all efforts to resolve their complaint. People are trained not hear back from the companies they work with, so when you respond quickly you can win their confidence.
Real-time website testimonials
Publish customer feedback to your website with one click
After you set up a good process to take care of negative and neutral feedback, you should make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the positive comments you’ll be receiving.
SimpleSat makes it easy to publish these comments directly on your website with the click of a button. No more out-of-date website testimonials!
Fresh Testimonials right to your website
Customer Experience as a superpower
It is not likely a client would refer you to a peer in their industry because you have great technology. In many cases, the people running the businesses you support do not care about the technology. The hired you, so they Don’t have to care about technology. What they DO care about is if they get value for the service you provide and if their staff complain about the service you provide. The quality of the customer service you deliver and the client satisfaction with that service is the only true differentiator you have in the IT support industry. Make customer service your business superpower. Measure it, improve it, and win your clients love in the process.
For more info on the simplest customer satisfaction survey system in the industry check out SimpleSat and sign up for a free trial today.
