Do you know what your customers are thinking?

Right now your customers are experiencing your services or interacting with your company. Can they easily interact with you to provide feedback, or do they have to vent their frustration into other communities?

I am still surprised at the number of organizations that don't offer their customers the opportunity to provide real-time feedback about how things are going. Many companies rely on the age-old monthly, quarterly or (yikes) annual courtesy call initiated by a sales reps to touch base with the customer to see if they need to buy more stuff. Many companies also incorporate an annual or bi-annual survey (which are now mostly conducted online) into their customer feedback loop, and many others use automated surveys which are sent to a customer after closing each case (or problem ticket).

Do these approaches go far enough? Well, not really. Why?

1. Often the annual survey tries to do too much and in the end only a couple of questions really matter. The questions in the annual survey are broad in scope and typically everything hinges on the responses to two critical questions - "How are we doing overall?" and "Would you recommend us to others?". Usually team bonuses are linked to these two questions and the account team mobilizes (reacts) to focus resources on bringing these scores back in line. Usually at all costs.
2. The periodic survey also lacks any spontaneity. Usually good and bad experiences are not remembered and the general impression "today" is used to complete the survey. 
3. The people who generally complete the case-closed surveys and in some cases the periodic surveys are generally focused on day-to-day issues and may not have an awareness about other important questions (often never asked). They may not have a handle on the critical problems your solution is addressing and the resulting value it delivers. In short, there is no guarantee the person completing the survey understands the business impact of your service.

We believe there is a simple solution to this problem. We also believe cost effective cloud-based tools will ensure you appear caring and professional in the eyes of your customers.

Our recommendation for collecting immediate and relevant customer feedback is twofold:

1. Always-on Feedback - Provide an immediate feedback mechanism for customers on your website through which feedback may immediately and easily be submitted. In its most basic implementation this is an online form. In its most progressive usage this is a forum on your website where the issues are discussed amongst all customers. Using this approach, customers are allowed to post new forum threads and interact on any number of topics. Your organization assigns forum owners and ensures each thread is followed. For some of our larger projects we have also implemented private forums with specific customers using Drupal to create highly interactive communities for collaboration and content sharing across all issues of a major project implementation. Drupal also gives us the full power of a Content Management System to create private areas for specific sub-groups. In one implementation we created a private area for the CEO to document and discuss specific ideas, programs and measures.
2. Where's the Beef? - In the days before super-sized fast food this was the question asked by a fast food chain when it talked about its competitors' "more bun that burger approach". In the case of your customers the bottom line question is - "where's the value?" Companies grow their customer base by delivering value. We need to be continually confirming the value we are delivering to our customers. Recently, our company delivered a project for a client where we designed a value discovery survey using Survey Gizmo where we asked specific questions about the value received from their solutions. The potential respondents were selected in our salesforce.com database based on contact attributes we had assigned in salesforce.com. The list was exported to MailChimp, which is our email management tool of choice, due to its capabilities and direct integration to the salesforce.com API. Survey Gizmo has a direct integration to Mailchimp, which allowed us to use the capabilities of viewing email opens, click thrus, and ultimately responses, directly in MailChimp. While we used the survey dashboard and reports in Survey Gizmo to analyse the results, management at our client company simply used MailChimp to view all of the results. In this particular case the value of the solutions were validated through the survey responses and the information collected will be used to launch a very important new partnership and marketing program. We expect to drive even more value for customers and significant new revenues.

As usual, the cloud services we mentioned in this post are tools we use with customers all of the time. We are not paid to write about them, however, we have joined the affiliate programs of some of them.

The online value survey we developed will be made available through the corporate website for any customer to complete at any time. The information collected through these value surveys will have many purposes:

1. Add to our library of top challenges faced by our customers and how our solutions address them.
2. Influence our marketing collateral development and demonstration scenarios used during the buying process.
3. Validate our pricing strategies.
4. Enhance the conversation about customer challenges and value we are having both in sales and through our online presence.
5. Influence our product management function and determine the highly valued features and those which are not valued.
6. Train our customer service representatives on how our solutions create value for customers and how they should be assisting customers.

When you implement a program of soliciting Always on Feedback and Where's the Beef feedback from your customers, your customers will view their relationship with your organization more strategically. In it's simplest form of implementation using Survey Gizmo, you can be doing it in an afternoon. Don't start the program with endless internal meetings to get the questions just right. Just get started!

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