BURYING ONES HEAD IN THE SAND

The United States has an extremely competitive economic environment in all sectors including the service sector and factually, small businesses dominate the space. Given this fact, it is mind blowing how little interest many service-providers take about the quality of service that they provide, especially small and mid-sized providers.

Many larger companies will follow up on the service that they provide by requesting their customers to complete a Customer Satisfaction Survey. Many of these companies, such as Toyota will actually base the commission of the service representative on the results of the customers survey – this is the importance they place on the opinions of their customers. However, most small and mid-sized businesses are like the proverbial ostrich with their heads buried in the sand – they don’t seem to want to know or care about how they well they performed. When last did you receive a request from a small or mid-sized service provider to complete a customer satisfaction survey? Surely, they want to know how well or poorly they performed? Simple, questions such as the following should be critical to any organization in assessing whether they have any problems and if so, would be indicators in assisting them in improving:

• How well did we perform?
• Did we meet or exceed your expectations?
• Are you satisfied with the quality of our product?
• Were you happy with the professionalism of your service representative?
• Did we perform in a timely manner?
• What can we do better to improve our performance?
• Would you use our company again?
• Would you recommend our company to others?

Proactivity is one of the keys to success and knowing what your customers think is an essential element in getting ahead of problems.

Don’t be an Ostrich!!