Do You Know What Your Customers Really Think of You?

This year at Appletree we’re doing a lot to make our business more responsible. We renewed our membership of the clever 3P CSR Programme, which helps businesses see how responsible they are and how they can improve the situation. The assessment looks at a number of different areas of your business – including management, marketing and service delivery – and gives you a score for how well you-re doing. Then it offers suggestions for improvements.

We’ve picked three areas to work on over the coming months – Planet (how does what you do affect our planet?), Legal (are you up to date with legal requirements?) and Service Delivery (how do you do what you do?)

One of the ways in which we can improve our score in Service Delivery (currently 62%) is by looking for improvements in how we deliver our service to our clients. How do we do this? By asking them what they think of us!

Scary? Yes! Will we hear things we don’t like? Probably! Worth doing? Definitely!

How often does one of your suppliers ask if you’re happy with what they do for you? Too many businesses assume that if you don’t complain, you’re happy with their service or what you bought from them. But if you have a bad meal in a restaurant, what will you do about it? You just won’t go back. And you might tell your friends not to go there. However, if you’re asked during your meal if you’re happy and you’re given a chance to complain about your over-cooked steak, the restaurant has the opportunity to do something about it. They could cook you another steak or not charge you for it. That way you’re more likely to go back and more likely to tell your friends to go there too.

But what if you don’t like the feedback you get? The way to deal with negative feedback is to do something about it and show your clients what you’re doing about it. When we carry out our survey, if any of our clients tell us they don’t like us emailing them, instead of phoning them on a weekly basis, then we’ll make sure we phone them every week instead of sending them emails. If one of them asks for a different style of monthly report on their Social Media, then we’ll change the way we report their results.

We’re currently working on putting together a short list of questions – no more than ten – which we’ll ask our clients to answer. Some of them will be asked over coffee or even lunch, to help us really explore their answers. When we’ve got all the results, we’ll let you (and our clients) know what they are and what we’re going to do about them.

When did you last ask your clients what they really think of you?