Can You Hear Me?

By Sharon Danks, Vice President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.

I recently had a brutally painful customer experience with a telephone service company. The amount of repeated efforts I had to go through to resolve an atypical, yet fairly simple issue was just “ridonculous.” To be more accurate, that would be ridonculous x 100. Suffice it say, they will never get our business again, and I’m just hoping the twitch I get every time I hear their name isn’t obvious and/or permanent. The overall experience left me asking the question, “How did the string of people I talked to throughout the process of trying to get resolution not hear me?” I was extremely clear, both verbally and in writing, about what our issue was and how we needed it to be resolved. However, not one person took the time to understand the details, nor did anyone care about what I was experiencing as a customer. The funny thing is, at every turn, I think each one of them honestly felt like they were doing the best they could to help given the “authorization” constraints placed on them. When each of them passed me off to someone else, I really think they felt good about their efforts to assist.

To add insult to injury, after months of lunacy, when the issue was finally resolved, we received an email sent automatically when your “case number” is closed out, asking, “How was your experience working with us?” Really?

The point of sharing my sad tale is to highlight this as a classic example of a company with a process for surveying customers that’s not connected in any way to the reality of the customer’s experience and/or to the touch points the customer has with the organization. If you’re doing customer surveys for the sake of saying you do them, and are not making your employees who deal with customers accountable for the experience and/or immediate problem resolution, then your process is fatally flawed.

The best way to gather customer feedback is through a proactive process that makes your customers feel valued versus a reactive process that customers easily recognize as an afterthought. All of us know when something is being done half-heartedly, and if your customers believe that is your attitude towards them, it’s only a matter of time before the result of that is lost business. All employees in the organization should be on-board with understanding how a customer’s experience impacts the bottom line, positively or negatively, and their role in providing customers with unrivaled service.

Conducting a customer perception survey on a regular basis should be an engaging, ongoing, exciting, meaningful activity that helps shape your organization’s products, services, and processes. It’s a chance to partner one-on-one with your customers to learn about the state of your organization as viewed from the outside. Bottom line: Is the opinion of anyone else more important than your customers when it comes to identifying ways to improve their experience so you can grow your business?

If you would like to know how effective your current customer survey process is, or if you’d like to be proactive in starting a new customer survey initiative, give us a call. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

One last thing: “Ridonculous.” From the movie Nemo. A must see.