Are your customers telling you the whole truth?
Determining whether or not your clients are truly satisfied with your service can be difficult at times. Clients who are polite and conflict-avoiding might not feel comfortable bringing up constructive criticism to you directly. However, they may pass along their thoughts to family, friends, and neighbors, which has the potential to affect future business. So, how do you gauge the satisfaction levels of your clients before it’s too late? Take a look at the following tips for measuring customer satisfaction, proven effective by GuildQuality members.
Survey and open the door for communication
One of the most effective ways to capture honest feedback is through a third-party like service GuildQuality. When developing your survey, consider what questions you’ll ask and determine whether each serves the purpose of providing insight into your client’s experience. A best practice is to address every aspect of the project including the initial sales process, design, construction, and completion of the punch list. Did your client meet with your employees or subcontractors? Ask specific questions about how they were treated. Every interaction your client has with your company affects their overall level of satisfaction.
You’ll also want to address the aspects of a project that mean the most to your clients. For most homeowners, budget, communication, schedule, quality materials, and cleanliness are going to be critical. Are you and your team meeting their expectations around these? Include questions on your survey so that you will know for sure.
Finally, it’s important to have a balance of open-ended and scaled questions featured in your survey. Open-ended questions allow for more candid qualitative feedback from your clients, while scaled questions provide you with concrete quantitative feedback. Additionally, you can use scaled and open-ended feedback to easily identify satisfaction patterns.
Determine your satisfaction benchmark
Once you have your survey process in place, it’s time to put some metrics around your client feedback. Many companies calculate their net promoter score (NPS) to measure client satisfaction and brand loyalty. The core of NPS is the ‘likely to recommend’ score. Within GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveys, a similar likely to recommend question is asked and measured on a 0 to 4 scale.
The satisfaction metric that most of our members use is the percentage of 4’s received, or, in some cases, the percentage of 3’s and 4’s. They focus on the likely to recommend question, but also zone in on other questions that are important to their business or are problems they need to address.
Our version of NPS is a report called the GuildQuality Index (GQI). The GQI helps members to understand the percentage of promoters they are creating in the marketplace, recognizing that detractors have an offsetting cost. More on the GQI here.
Keep an eye on the trends
You’ve surveyed your clients and you’ve determined your satisfaction benchmark, don’t stop there! Continue to monitor your company’s performance. Review each survey response you receive and compare results to other client feedback. Look for trends in aspects that you’re excelling at and promote those, look for items that could use some improvement and begin work to improve them. Reviewing survey feedback and analyzing trends in your company’s performance holds you and your team accountable and empowers you to deliver a better experience to your clients.
Beyond your company, do some research on the performance of others in your area within the same industry. Would your company be considered a leader in customer satisfaction? GuildQuality enables our members to see how their scores match up compared to companies with similar profiles. The peer comparison capability is reassuring for some, and a motivator for most.
Customer satisfaction has a huge influence on the success of your company. Being proactive and identifying how well your company pleases clients is critical. Want to learn more about GuildQuality’s survey process? Click here!
