If you’ve tried gathering customer feedback in the past, or you’re thinking about doing it now, a quick question. Why?What is your actual motivation for doing this?
It’s a basic question, but one that’s important to consider. Because when we think about it, the real driver for gathering customer feedback isn’t just about collecting data for the sake of it. It’s not just about showing ‘we’re listening’, or ticking boxes in order to show we’re hitting our customer service KPIs.
No: above all, asking our customers what they think about us is actually about driving action that then measurably improves the quality of those customer relationships. Because data or even insight without action means nothing to your customers.
Of course, it’s not always easy to take action. If the quality of the insights you get from the customer data you gather is poor, it’s hard to take action with confidence and it can be difficult to use customer feedback data if you don’t know how. Sometimes corporate teams lack experience in this field which can make it hard to take decisive action as a result.
With that in mind, we want to talk here about how we help project teams drive action within an organisation.
Actionable insights
Before we go into some of the specific advice around taking action that we offer to our clients, a quick point about the feedback we collect.
Although our core feedback programme, The Referral Rating, is just two questions, it provides a lot of detailed information about the things that are most important to your customers.
So, the differentiator between us and our competitors’ feedback programmes certainly isn’t about quantity. We still provide our clients with a great deal of data.
Rather, it’s about how we help our customers to take action with confidence as a result of that feedback. Our insights are always presented clearly and simply and are therefore actionable.
Crucially, we always support our clients to actually take that action too, with tools and templates they can use with their teams.
Here are a few key tips.
Closing the loop
After we’ve gathered customer feedback for our clients, we’ll hold multiple debriefing sessions to go through what we’ve discovered about their client relationships. And one of the most crucial parts of that session is around the importance of ‘closing the loop’.
Demonstrating you’re listening to customers is absolutely crucial. The message here is how important it is to go back to your customers and explain to them what you’ve learned, and what you’re going to do to fix any issues. Rarely can something be fixed over night, but communicating regularly is key.
Fail to act on feedback, or act, but fail to communicate what you’re doing and your customers won’t take you seriously. Trust breaks down.
It sounds obvious. But it’s remarkable how often customer feedback surveys are conducted in isolation – with little or no feedback loop in place.
So, be proactive. Ask for feedback, identify the root cause of problems, take action communicating as you go, then repeat.
Stay focused
In the face of a large number of valuable, actionable insights from your customer feedback, what’s your priority? Where do you start to make changes?
It’s an issue we’ve seen before – the project team who have received the feedback can suffer a ‘deer in the headlights’ moment, with too many areas where customers are asking for change to choose from.
There are always a lot of things to do as a result of customer feedback – it’s the entire point of conducting the programme in the first place. But as we always say, there are thousands of things you could do. There are hundreds you should do. But there are only a few that you can do.
So, the question we ask our clients is this: what are the two or three things that you can do now to make the biggest impact?
We also recommend that clients look at the bigger picture too. If you’re a global account manager, there might be people in your teams across the world who are individually trying to improve customer relationships in different ways.
But ultimately, as a leader, this is where you need to be strategic – to think about the priorities over the next year and to set an agenda for the whole global account team.
Set your level of intervention
This final point is an important one, because deciding the level of intervention is also a critical part of driving action from feedback. Our advice here is always to identify the level at which you need to intervene to improve a customer relationship.
For example, feedback might show that a customer issue needs to be dealt with at an individual level. This could require a change in behaviour from a specific account manager.
Or it could be action that’s required at an account level – like the example we gave just now of a global account manager setting the strategic areas of focus for the entire team.
The same could be said for a specific manufacturing site.
Or, and perhaps most critically, an issue could be organisation-wide, requiring cross functional collaboration in the form of working parties to fix the problem, and importantly real ownership at leadership level.
Deciding the level of intervention is always an important part of your action planning approach.
Helping you to take action with confidence
Ultimately, at The Customer Relationship Consultancy we’re experts in our own business, not yours. We’re leaders in customer feedback – so we’re not going to tell you, at any level, that you should do x or y to get ahead in your own industry.
What we will show you are pivotal truths and highlight where your issues lie. We’ll keep things simple, because we know how a lack of clear, actionable insight from customer feedback can be worse than no feedback at all.
We take our clients step-by-step through what we’ve discovered about your customer relationships. We’ll highlight the importance of root cause analysis, to get to the heart of where problems are coming from. And we’ll help you to frame those tricky conversations, both internal and external, that you’ll need to have in order to make things better.
You want to make your customer feedback programme world-class – the best it can be. But to achieve this, all of your teams need to be clear and confident about what they need to do next, as a result of what they’ve heard.
Here at The Customer Relationship Consultancy, we can support you to do that – so email us or call us on 01753 201341 today to discuss how we can help.
