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A loyal customer base requires happy customers—here’s how you can earn their smiles.

Statistics will tell you that 91% of unhappy customers will never buy anything from you again. A startling figure, especially if you’re concerned that your company may not be delivering the level of customer service you’re striving for. While most businesses recognize that customer happiness is paramount to their success, they often have difficulty measuring customer satisfaction.

Would you like to take a survey?

While some people may balk at surveys, they are still one of the most widely used tools for gaining customer feedback. Using surveys, you can get the feedback you need to eliminate customer churn. Surveys offer insight into areas of improvement and can help you identify clients that may be a risk. But the key to maximizing the value of your surveys is to design them to get the highest response rate possible—they’re of no value if your customers don’t participate.

So let’s take a look at some important factors to consider when creating a survey for your customers:

• Make it as easy and simple as possible: The best surveys offer customers the opportunity to simply check off their answers from several choices.

• Keep it short: The shorter the survey, the higher your chances are of getting a response.
• Ask pointed questions: Make your questions as direct and focused as possible; generalities are not useful because they don’t allow you to identify key issues
• Ask about renewal intention: Whether or not your customer intends to renew their contract with you is a good way to gauge how satisfied and happy they are with your service
• Implement surveys into your service process: Tell customers up front that you’ll be sending them a customer service survey because you value their input and use it to improve your service
• Survey on a regular basis: Whether you do it on a quarterly basis or another time schedule, get customer feedback regularly so you can address any issues before they cause churn
• Don’t overdo it: Of course, it’s important not to make surveys something your customers dread, so use them only at specified times, for example, when a customer closes a ticket.

Implement follow-up procedures

After every sales presentation or business proposal, what’s the first thing you do? Follow up, right? The same holds true for monitoring customer happiness. If you’ve requested feedback from your customers, some will immediately respond, others will take longer to get back to you and some won’t respond at all. While you definitely don’t want to hassle any of your customers, following up is key to increasing your response rate and getting a handle on which customers are happy and which ones are not.

• First follow up: Send a friendly reminder email one week after the survey was sent
• Second follow up: Send a second friendly reminder two weeks after the survey was sent

Each follow-up email should include a link to the survey and a quick note about how much their opinion matters to you. Customers who don’t respond to either follow up are most likely too busy or are just not interested in providing feedback. Your final follow up on these folks should occur a few weeks after the second reminder and give them the option to call you directly with any criticism or issues.

Track responses

Your surveys are of little value if you don’t track and respond to the feedback you collect. Take the time to implement a system where you can keep track of all the survey responses; both positive and negative feedback is helpful and should be used to gauge changes in your service.

Respond immediately and personally to any issues that arise from surveys—an email won’t suffice in the case of a customer who is upset or disappointed with the service they’ve received. Take the time to call the client and discuss whatever issues there are or set up a time to go by their office to meet with them in person.

Get your crew involved

As the face of your organization, your staff is on the front lines of customer engagement. They can be the difference between happy customers that continue to renew their service contract and those who churn, so it only makes sense to get these folks involved in ensuring that customer service protocols are not only met, but continually exceeded.

The first step is to ensure that all of your team members know exactly what level of customer service is expected and that they’ve been trained thoroughly on how to interact with and serve customers. Implementing an incentive program that sets goals, offers incentives, measures their performance and rewards them for a job well done can serve as the foundation for ensuring that each and every customer gets the best possible experience every time they interact with your company.

Using an employee engagement tool like ours helps you engage your employees. Engaged employees are important because they not only care about your business, they’re also happier, more productive and do their jobs better. And as you know, happier, more efficient employees increase the happiness factor amongst your customers.

Learn more about our online recognition platform and how you can use it to improve customer service and client satisfaction today.