Customer Feedback is King

Knowing what you do well and what you can do better makes perfect business sense but how do you go about it?

As busy owners and managers you don’t have time to design and analyse surveys which capture customer feedback.  Some of you may have a dedicated member of staff whose role it is to monitor customer feedback but how many of you are ISO 9000 accredited for quality management?

Principle 1 on customer focus states: Organisations depend on their customers and therefore should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and strive to exceed customer expectations.

The standard expects you to use research to enable you to understand your customer needs and expectations but is your customer feedback done for compliance or is it done properly to help you to continually improve your business?

Getting Real Value from Customer Feedback

There is a world of difference between running a tick box customer feedback compliance exercise as opposed to real research into your customer experience.  A lot of businesses routinely ask customers to provide feedback after purchasing products which meets your ISO 9000 requirements but it does not give you benchmarks that tell you how well you are doing in their eyes.  There is a good business case for conducting annual customer feedback snapshots because it helps you set new KPIs and customer service standards for the year ahead and allows you to know how well you have or have not done when you survey them the following year.

Here are some real benefits that annual customer feedback surveys or customer consultations can bring to your business:

  • An annual snapshot of what your customers think of their experience in dealing with your company.
  • Measurable scores such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Recommendation Rate.
  • Invaluable constructive feedback on how well you could be doing.
  • Robust evidence for ISO 9000 reassessments.
  • Departmental breakdowns on how well they are looking after your customers.
  • Lead generation because asking customers what they think often triggers new business enquiries.
  • Surveying customers reminds them you are still there and more importantly, still interested in them.
  • Using online surveys which go straight into the inboxes of your customers helps you to clean up your customer contact databases.
  • Professionally Designed Customer Delivers Real Insight

Setting up a well-designed customer feedback survey that, doesn’t take too long to complete and makes sense to the person you want to fill it in, can be done in-house but the process takes time and detracts from the day job.  Using professional market researchers can save you time and money and will deliver top notch results.  Using a third party company like IQ4Business brings objectivity to the process and customers feel they can be more honest and open if they know that someone they deal with isn’t reading what they have to say.

To find out more please contact us on  01200 400127 or via email at info@iq-4business.co.uk