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How do you know if your customer service is failing?

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 18 December, 2014

How do you know if your customer service is failing?Do you know how your customers are experiencing their dealings with your company? Are they happy with your service and would they recommend you or are they unwilling to use your business again?

Instead of focusing your customer service efforts on constant fire fighting, implementing a customer feedback survey can help you focus on creating an excellent customer-service culture for the future.

Here's how:


A customer experience survey lets you be the fly on the wall 

The right survey allows you to get a critical insight into what your customers think of you, including your advocates and detractors. This allows you to contact the ones who are not happy with your service and resolve the situation quickly. 

NPS is used globally as an important business metric to measure customer loyalty and sentiment of reputation. It basically establishes the likelihood of a customer to recommend your product or service to another person on a scale of 0-10.

The NPS survey asks your customers: “How likely is it that you'll recommend this company, product or service to a friend or colleague?” The response options range from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). The responses are then usually grouped as follows:

  • Promoters: Responses from 9-10
  • Passives: Responses from 7-8
  • Detractors: Responses from 0 to 6 


The formula to get your overall NPS score the percentage of customers who are detractors, subtracted from the percentage who are promoters. This is when the magic happens. How you then evaluate and follow up on your scores is what makes NPS so valuable for businesses all over the world.

 

Related content: Customer experience game changes that grow revenue

 


NPS as an indicator for future growth

At Customer Monitor, we always include strategic questions in our surveys, to be able to identify the root causes and understand what businesses need to improve. Your NPS software needs to be able to give your business the data it needs to be able improve your NPS score, not just show you what it is. 

Successful businesses worldwide using NPS actively follow up with their detractors to learn what they’re doing wrong and what they can improve. Then they promptly take the measures needed to better their services.

NPS can be a bit of a reality check for businesses as it exposes how their customer experience and in fact, business as a whole, is performing. In a wider sense, it can also be an indicator for future growth as you are in essence measuring your customer satisfaction levels (i.e. the potential for repeat business and word-of-mouth through referrals).

 


Reach out to your detractors

When learning who your detractors are, it’s crucial to make the effort to contact these people to learn exactly what you’re doing right and wrong. This is where you’ve got the chance to fix broken pieces of your customer service offering.

But you’ll want both sides of the story so it’s important you talk to the two ends of the spectrum who have strong opinions about you, both good and bad. By conducting NPS surveys on a regular basis, you can see if new customer-service initiatives are helping.

Keeping your existing customers loyal is more cost efficient than constantly trying to acquire new customers, so if your customers are happy and willing to recommend you, you’re halfway there. There is evidence1 that companies with the highest customer experience [scores] typically grow at more than double the rate of their competitors. But if you focus on the wrong things, you can loose this edge very quickly. Have you checked your customers’ experience lately?

 


Learn more about mastering customer service with our free ebook below!

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1 Bain & Co

Topics: Customer Experience


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