Customer satisfaction is an important metric for businesses as it provides the opportunity to make improvements and strengthen their growth. How do you know if your customers are satisfied? The best way is to ask. Customer feedback serves the purpose of letting businesses know how their product or service was received.
With the rise of customer power, companies mainly dedicate their time and marketing efforts to delivering a superior customer experience. It is no longer enough to meet the customer’s expectations. To grab the leader spot, a business must surpass the expectations and delight its customers.
Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
– Tony Alessandra
There is a huge disconnect between the level of CX companies think they are providing and what their customers think they are receiving. Forrester reports: “84% of firms aspire to be a CX leader, but only 1 out of 5 companies delivers good or great service”.
Customers are the only customer service experts and it is their opinion that counts. To know the level of customer service a company provides requires measuring it. While receiving customer feedback can be challenging, it is attainable.
Case Majoria Drugs
To illustrate the point, we will use HappyOrNot customer Majoria Drugs as an example. Rhett Majoria, owner of 2 pharmacies, has this to share with other businesses owners who made a commitment to customer focus and are looking for strategies to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty:
We currently have 2 store locations, each with large pharmacies, large front-ends and large vitamin/supplement departments. Pharmacy is an extremely competitive space, so remaining in business for nearly 50 years and enjoying an excellent reputation in our community has been the payoff. Having long term staff (currently about 60 employees) and low employee turnover is a direct result of our culture and values, and having strong relationships with our customers makes this work fun and rewarding.
To receive customer feedback, both pharmacies used Comment Card method. We would get maybe 5 comment cards per week. We would move the comment box stand around the store to try and increase response, but it did little to help. It was not very useful, and we know now that everyone is so busy that filling out a comment card simply takes too much time. Too few responses, and of no use to determine time/staff associated with any particular problems or positive responses. Plus, it was just an extra thing to do each day (in checking the box) that often got overlooked or put on the back burner once the day started.
Deploying HappyOrNot customer satisfaction terminals in both pharmacies to gather customer feedback has proven to be an indispensable management tool to use in our weekly reporting to staff. In the report, we let them know how they are doing in giving our customers our best efforts.
The most surprising thing was the volume of customer responses- we were shocked, but gratified with getting good sample sizes from which to draw conclusions. Customers loved that we cared enough about their experience to invest in something like this.
The presence of Smiley Terminals made everyone more aware of their interaction with customers, especially since we post the weekly results on our staff board and discuss the results in our meetings. It provides a great way to give special praise on those exceptional days, and a non-threatening way to ask about ‘any potential problems’ on those days with a few more negatives. Having two stores also allows us to compare and contrast- and dare I say be a bit competitive- with the results. Our staff has derived pride in getting the recognition for great work that HappyOrNot allows us to now collect.
The reporting service data allows us to also share the results to motivate and reward staff for work well done. With so many customer responses, the data is sound and hard to argue with. It also gives us a neutral party we can point to as the source of something we need to address, as opposed to what someone on staff might have confidentially reported to us.
Future plans include having a store competition to see who can get the highest scores.
We do the normal assessment of when the red responses occur. We then review the staff that was on schedule. We also email out the daily 100% reports to the pharmacy staff when that happens, sort of a ‘great job’ dopamine hit!
We also did a short video of an employee doing a live demo and explanation of the console and why it’s so important to us. The Facebook response when we posted was extremely positive- great customer PR.
And finally, we have found an uptick in customer engagement over time (almost a year now), which usually doesn’t happen for us when we launch something new. This has remained very popular with our new and old customers alike.
Awesome tool!
Rhett Majoria, Co-Owner / Chief Pharmacist | Majoria Drugs
http://www.majoria.com/
