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. 

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For more info on the simplest customer satisfaction survey system in the industry check out SimpleSat and sign up for a free trial today.

5 Key Ingredients To A Successful Team

Google is a massive company and has had tremendous success. So what's the secret to growing a company like Google? The people operations team (HR) set off on a two-year quest to research what made successful teams. They guessed it would be something to do with a supportive team composition with complimentary skillsets and experience. What they found instead was something much simpler than they expected.

Google loves data and in order to research what makes a successful team, they spent two years interviewing 200+ Google staff members from all sorts of different teams. Development, sales, finance, marketing, everyone they could get their hands on. They cataloged the attributes of the teams and compared them against various performance metrics. These were the top 5 attributes to the teams that had the highest performance and most engaged team members.

1. Psychological safety: Confidence to speak and act without feeling insecure or being embarrassed.
2. Dependability: Individuals can count on each other to deliver high-quality work on time.
3. Structure & clarity: Team has clear goals and plans to execute.
4. Meaning of work: Feeling their work has personal meaning to them.
5. Impact of work: Feeling their work makes a contribution.

5 keys to team performance according to Google Re:Work

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Psychological safety

One of my all-time favorite business books, is Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. One of the central themes of the book is how teams are an extension of tribal culture and there is a deep-rooted need for safety in groups. This is demonstrated really well by close bonds formed between military units and first responders. Most of us are lucky, in that if our team members fail us we won't die. Military and first responders lives often depend on the person standing next to them. In the book, Sinek speaks to how a team with a low level of trust will often turn on each as they sense a threat from each other. A strong team will bond together and recognize the external threat. Everyone can recognize the truth in this. We've all been a part of teams that were bogged down in infighting and people sniping at each other. The amount of distraction and negativity this creates is a huge boat anchor on productivity and morale. Naturally, teams that don't trust each other perform poorly compared to teams with high trust.

Dependability

Dependability feels like an extension of trust to me. If team members feel that their peers will deliver their work on time, it has a tangible impact on trust. It also serves as peer motivation for the rest of the team to also deliver high-quality work on time. Of course, the inverse is true as well. When a team member doesn't deliver their work, the rest of the team gets frustrated and sometimes feels less inclined to do their work as well. This is why flagging and managing underperforming team members is critical. You can't let them spoil the work product of the rest of the team. Provided the team sees that a manager or even other peers are applying pressure to that person to correct their accountability, that can be enough to keep the team performance from suffering overall.

Structure & Clarity

This is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of business planning. In most cases there is no strategic plan for the company. If something does exist it's often in the owners head. The effectiveness of leadership has a strong correlation to being able to communicate the goals of the organization. It's not enough to say, "We want to make lots of money and provide great service." I encourage businesses to write down strategic plans in a simple format that makes it easy to communicate. This is often done in the form of a one-page-plan. There are several ways to do this Gazelles, Traction, A3 (lean method). You don't need a 13 page report on your strategy. It will only make it more difficult to communicate. A simple one pager that outlines the goals of the organization is drastically easier to explain to someone else.

Once you have the clarity of the plan with target goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). It becomes easier to measure what is needed from staff. The clarity of the core responsibilities of the role make it much easier for management and staff to agree on what productive work look like. It shifts the conversation from, "You're not doing well at your job." Which is subjective and feels like a personal attack to, "You closed 4 tickets this week. Everyone else on your team hit 15. So what happened?" Don't fear measuring your staff performance. Provided your KPIs are fair, people will love the visibility. People that resist metrics are usually under performers. 

Meaning/Impact

I will roll these two together since I feel they are strongly related and probably the toughest ones to get in place. Unless you work for an organization that is saving whales or curing cancer. It can be tough to conceptualize the impact you have in your job. This is why is critical for leadership to help frame the impact of people's work. In a knowledge based job like technology it's tough for people to point to a job well done. Hopefully you have some metrics to measure your success, but it's not like you can point to a house or a bridge and say, "I built that."

Some simple things you can do are ensuring staff have a sense of direction in their career. As a part of their development they need to be thinking about their future. Do they want to grow in to a management position? Do they want to be the cloud or security expert in the group? Do they want to complete their CCNA or MCSE? Whatever their goals, the goals need to be kept alive by the team member and actively supported by management.

Celebrating success with the team is also important for a group sense of accomplishment. When you win a new client do you ring a gong in the office, or have everyone participate in a group cheer? When you complete a large project or new client on-boarding, do you order in a nice lunch (not just pizza) or a cake to mark the occasion? Keep your team success visible and celebrate at every opportunity. It will be really helpful to the teams morale and sense of accomplishment.

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If you'd like to learn a bit more abut creating psychological safety you can watch this TEDx talk from Amy Edmondson below.