We’re fond of saying that customer loyalty isn’t something you earn once—it’s something you must earn over and over again at every opportunity. You earn it with each interaction, whether it’s when a customer visits your retail store, calls your customer service, or receives a follow-up call from your salesperson. Customer loyalty, which comprises everything from repeat patronage to referrals, is the single most important factor in achieving long-term profitability.
How do you keep an eye on that loyalty? We’ve often extolled the benefits of mystery shopping, which allow you to focus on the smallest details to ensure the customer experience is as great as you expect. Making sure your employees execute on those small details is critical, of course. But we shouldn’t forget to check in with your customers to see how the big picture comes together, which is exactly what customer feedback surveys can achieve in tandem with your mystery shops.
Two Models
We’ve all seen feedback surveys. Many businesses use them when you complete an order by sending you an email. Restaurants often include comment cards in their guest-check presenters. Even over-the-phone support asks you to complete a survey at the end of the call.
Feedback surveys can be personal or anonymous. Personal surveys, where you know exactly who the customer is, afford you the opportunity to further interact with him or her. The obvious use-case would be a follow-up with a dissatisfied patron to make a situation right, though note well that your employees should still reach out even when a customer is happy to thank them for the feedback. In order to keep these kinds of surveys personal, your employees personalize them by responding so that your customers don’t see your business as faceless. Show them you take all those comments seriously and that a person is reading them on the other side of the screen.
Anonymous surveys don’t lend themselves to that personal touch, but they do permit your customers to give you an unfiltered opinion. Usually this means that you’ll hear harsher reviews because the person leaving that feedback isn’t worried about his or her identity, but that’s okay. Businesses don’t engage in mystery shopping or feedback surveys to get simple pats on the back all the time—those are nice, but your quest for ongoing customer loyalty requires criticism if it’s to be a successful venture.
Creating a Strategy
At The Brandt Group, we like to combine these two survey types whenever we can. The way to do this is simple but effective: we build a survey that asks decisive questions to get at incisive answers, but we do so with anonymity in mind. We then offer the option of making the survey personal to the customer before he or she completes it: “May we contact you about your experience with us?” This method invites customers to be as brutally honest as possible, secure in the comfort that the survey is anonymous, but it then gives them a last-second chance to connect with your business if they realize that’s what they really want or need after venting.
This model allows us to aggregate individual, usually anonymous experiences to give you a better sense of the big picture, but it also gives you another tool with which to stay in touch with the customers who really need it. Remember that feedback surveys don’t replace mystery shops, which are far more detail-oriented, complex, and technically evaluative; instead, they offer a fantastic complement to your customer-loyalty strategy.
Learn more about feedback surveys here and then make sure you reach out to us so we can get started on developing your customer-loyalty strategy for your business with delay.
