If you want to make changes to your customer service processes you really need to create a plan so you can make the changes with a minimum of disruption to your clients and to your staff. I’ve already written a comprehensive post about options you need to think about when you start customer service planning in Planning Customer Service Process but it’s also really important to take in feedback from your customers as part of the process.
Survey your customers
Surveys can be done both formally and informally and I think it’s best to use a combination of both to get customer feedback. While a formal survey will give you answers around a specific set of questions, informal surveys may bring up ideas that you hadn’t even considered that could turn out to be exactly what you need to do.
Formal Surveys
For a formal survey, use something like Survey Monkey to create a survey for clients. Take care to think about what you want to ask and make sure you phrase questions clearly and concisely. If you want more tips for creating a survey that gets results, check out my post Customer Surveys: 6 Tips to get the most out of them. It’s also a good idea to offer a discount, a voucher or some other incentive for completion of the survey.
Informal Surveys
For an informal survey, get your frontline staff to ask your clients what they want when they’re talking to them. You should also check your social media feeds and mentions to see what people are saying in social media. Don’t just check your business accounts, but check what people are saying about the industry and what people are saying to your key competitors and larger businesses in the industry.
Run a trial
Another option is to run a limited trial of a product or service to see how it resonates you’re your customers . Who you get to take part in the trial will depend on the reason for introducing the new product or service.
Attract new customers
If your goal is to attract new customers, it’s best to offer the trial to new customers, or to existing customers who will be increasing their order from you. Advertising to the wider public, or industry groups and contacts will be more likely to attract potential new customers. Marketing to your existing customers may get you some useful feedback, but it won’t give you any insight about whether the product or service is something that will attract new customers.
Improve a current product or service
If you’re making improvements to products or services that you currently offer, you need to make the trial available to existing customers in the first instance. If you have customers who you have exceptionally good communication with, they will be ideal as you’ll get better feedback from them. Otherwise consider offering the trial firstly to VIP customers, customers with the largest spend and customers with the most frequent orders. They will be the ones who are most likely to be able to give you feedback on how well the improvements work for them.
Increase volume of orders
If you aim is to increase the number of orders from existing customers, then it doesn’t really matter whether the trial is offered to existing or new customers. It’s more important to decide on the ideal minimum volume and run the trial for “orders over XXX”. That way you can both get feedback from the participants in the trial, and also from your staff about how well the process works and what needs to be tweaked.
One of the most important things to remember is that whatever your plan is, you’ll need to tweak it after you get the customer feedback, then get more feedback and tweak it again. Don’t be discouraged when customers don’t like something – the fact they’re telling you about it means that they want you to succeed.
