As a B2B customer relationship consultancy, we always enjoy getting feedback from our own clients. It’s great for us to hear how they feel about our feedback programme and how they use it to improve their customer relationships.
During recent interviews, one of our clients said this to us:
“We get better data from your 2-question survey than we’d get from a 50-question one.”
We’re glad to hear it. In this post we thought it might be useful to explain why this is the case, because the reasons for it go to the root of our unique approach.
The problem with conventional surveys
First of all, we don’t do conventional surveys.
With conventional surveys, the survey will typically ask a lot of different questions. These will often be segmented – there might be a section on customer service, another on quality, yet another on supply chain performance.
The result? Reams and reams of data. A huge report. Which is what people pay for, isn’t it?
Well, of course this isn’t actually the case.
Our clients tell us that what they want from surveys is to hear clear, honest messages from their customers. Messages that they can act on – and even build strategies on.
Our unique approach to customer feedback
To achieve this, our approach is simple. We call it The Referral Rating, and in it we ask just two questions.
One measures the likelihood that the respondent would recommend the business to a colleague or friend. And the other asks them simply, ‘what makes you feel this way?’– offering an insight into customer sentiment.
We’ve posted about the benefits of having a systematic customer feedback programme elsewhere. But our unique format has a number of key advantages over more conventional approaches.
Its brevity means that people are happy to respond. This means a good response rate - typically 60%. And that first question provides a metric and a KPI, which allows our clients to compare and track performance over time.
But the real value comes when we analyse the feedback from that second question.
Our clients tell us it can be hard to draw key messages from conventional surveys. It’s why we’ve found that simply asking an open question allows people to talk about the things that really matter to them most. It allows them to tell their own story.
To analyse what they tell us, we take their verbatim feedback and code it to allow us to identify the most common themes and whether the balance of sentiment is positive or negative across each one. The things your customers talk about most often are the things they feel are most important. In this way, the data reflects their priorities, not what we (or our clients) might think is important.
In contrast, the conventional survey approach – where you set the themes over multiple questions – risks completely missing the things that actually matter to your customers.
Creating clear, actionable insights
Often the feedback reveals as much about how you are perceived to behave as it does about your operational performance. Our analysis will turn this feedback and data into clear and easy to communicate messages.
We’ll do this with visual guides – everything from infographics to word clouds - giving key members of your team in different parts of the business the key messages that are relevant to them.
And our consultants also sit down with you and debrief you fully after each survey round. It’s a chance to hear what you’re perceived to do well, and where you are not meeting your customers’ expectations.
We’ll spend time with you. We’ll get to know you and the culture of your business. And we’ll then give you recommendations for action based on our independent observation and our own long experience.
Throughout the process the emphasis is always on clear messages – so that you can take effective action.
What you do then, of course, is up to you – it’s your business after all. But as a result of our advice, we can be sure that you will be able to take action with confidence – and that your customer relationships will be better for it.
If you’d like to find out more about how our simple reports and clear messages can improve your customer relationships, email us or call us on 01753 201341 today.
