Have you lost any customers this year? If so, do you know why? More specifically, what contact points with your company caused your customer to leave you and buy from a competitor?
Your company is only as strong as its weakest link. One of your most important management tasks is to identify any weak links and immediately take corrective action.
We’re providing a step-by-step process to accurately detect and successfully cure a weak link. The process may be easily modified to suit your unique situation. The keys to success in this process are total company involvement, honesty, and willingness and sincere desire to improve your customer service.
If you are serious about detecting and curing your weakest link, do the following:
Step 1 – Identify Customer Expectations. What do your customers expect from you? The ideal way to find out is to ask your customers. Many small business owners, however, can’t or don’t want to trouble their customers for this information. Luckily, your employees may be able to provide you with some answers.
Employees with daily, direct customer contact are very knowledgeable about your customers’ service expectations. Gather together a team of employees with at least one representative from each and every department and location. Their ultimate mission is to determine what your customer expects, rate how your company is doing at each of the expectations, then design a customer “Report Card” that focuses on your weakest areas.
You will get the best information on customer expectations by using a group brainstorming technique. To brainstorm, seat your employees in a circle. To begin, one person answers the question “What do our customers expect from us?” Going around the circle, each person takes a turn with an answer.
If an employee cannot think of anything at the time of their turn, they say “pass.” Keep going around the circle repeatedly until everyone is out of ideas. The rules to effective brainstorming are:
1. Keep answers short – no explanations or dissertations. You want to generate as many ideas in as short a time frame as possible.
2. No comment or criticism on any idea.
As the group formulates ideas of what your customers expect, a non-group member records the ideas on large, white, butcher-style paper. After the group has exhausted their ideas, the lists are taped on the wall so everyone can see all the ideas at one time.
Next, ask the team to group ideas of similar themes and eliminate duplicates. You may have 100 ideas, but by the time you study and analyze them, there are only 20 or so main themes.
STEP 2 – Grade Your Company. Once you have identified major customer expectations, have your employees rate how your company is doing in meeting each of the identified expectations. Use traditional school grades as follows:
A = Great.
B = Good, but could be better.
C = Just O.K.
D = Less than O.K.
F = Company is Failing!
Honesty is critical here and employees must know and feel comfortable that no one will be chastised or held accountable for giving a poor grade. Problem areas should begin to become evident as the grades are posted.
At this point, we suggest that you end the session for the day and proceed to get grades from all employees in your company. By using the small employee group’s data, you can design a mini-report card to give to all employees. Their grades will give you a better sense of the extent of any operational or customer service deficiencies.
Don’t discount a poor mark from any one individual, even if all other employees give high marks for the same item. There must be a reason why the employee gave an “F” and that reason should be explored.
STEP 3 – Customer Report Card. So far you’ve identified what your customers expect and how your employees think you are doing at meeting those expectations. The next step is to see if this perception is correct by surveying your customers.
You will begin by designing a Customer Report Card that focuses on your suspected areas of weaknesses. Design your survey to fit on no more than one front and back 8 1/2 by 11 page. If you want a high response rate, you must make the report card very quick and easy to complete, preferably with check-off type answers.
Also, leave room for customer comments. Your customer may have something important to tell you that you did not cover in your questions.
Next, make sure the report card gets in the hands of the person who should fill it out. For instance, if you are a wholesaler and you think your weakest link may be your order process, make sure it goes to buyers. If your weak link is invoicing, be sure the survey goes to the accounting department, etc.
Don’t miss this golden opportunity to find out if your customers purchase your goods and services elsewhere. Ideally, you want to know what share of each customer’s business you command. For instance, a wholesaler can ask the question, “What percentage of your product needs do you purchase through our company?” This is valuable information for cross-selling opportunities.
STEP 4 – Take Action. Once your report cards come back, you must take action upon any comments and cure all deficiencies identified. Any customer who takes the time to make an extensive comment should be called for 1) a more detailed explanation of the problem if needed and 2) your solution.
As you compile and analyze your customer report cards, patterns of dissatisfaction will begin to emerge. The marketer who used this report card suspected he had billing trouble after surveying his employees. His drivers were leaving invoices at the time of fuel drop and often taxes were miscalculated so the paperwork would have to be corrected at the office.
Some customers paid off the driver invoice (which was wrong), while others waited for a computer invoice (which sometimes never came if the driver’s math was good on the first invoice). The report card confirmed that all this was very confusing to the customer. The solution? The company stopped using the drop point invoice and began sending same-day computer-generated, accurate bills.
If possible, after an action plan is developed to cure all identified problems, send a thank you letter to all the customers who took the time to complete the report card. Include a brief description of the problems identified, their solutions, and your timetable to fix them. This shows your customer that you listened, you care about their satisfaction level with your company and you are taking active measures to make it easier for them to do business with you.
Ideally, if you want to keep your customer satisfaction chain strong, make this report card process an annual event.
