Are Your Clients Happy, Or Just Polite?
Feedback options for the small business
The two main approaches to gathering customer feedback are surveys and personal interviews, although some programs incorporate both. Online and mail surveys are less expensive—requiring only the employee hours spent writing and sending queries, and perhaps a bill from the printer—but experts say the results are less reliable. “Face-to-face is the best format for professional service organizations that are largely relationship-driven,” says Meherg. “But electronic and telephone surveys can provide valuable information as well.”
Electronic surveys can provide ongoing input from a large number of customers. Subscription services like SurveyMonkey.com, which charges $19.95 per month, offer a variety of features and allow customers to compile as many as 1,000 responses per month.
However, John Geddie, a principal at Martin-Simonds Associates Inc. in Albuquerque, N.M., which helps architectural and engineering firms gather client feedback through direct interviews, says questionnaires can be counter-productive. “You’re asking people to take time out of their day to fill out paperwork,” he says. That can skew results: The clients who like the firm will fill out the survey. “If I don’t, I’ll throw it in the trashcan,” says Geddie. Written and electronic survey responses also lack the context of body language and tone of voice, Geddie says. If 75% of interpersonal communication is non-verbal—as some behavioral scientists believe—then a questionnaire can only gather a fraction of the information available from a face-to-face interview. Geddie says you can get more out of one or two interviews than from a written survey.
Customer-satisfaction interviews can be tackled without third-party consultants. In fact, advisers who help companies set up feedback systems recommend having the CEO or a principal conduct all interviews, rather than a consultant.
An in-house interview system is not necessarily cheaper, if you calculate the value of the boss’s time that goes into preparing the questions, interviewing and following up. From the client’s perspective, however, a visit from the president or other top executive conveys the message that the client is valued and taken seriously.
That only works if the execs remember that they’re looking for information, not pitching or spinning. “If you’ve got executives who are going to do interviews, they ought to be extremely talented in keeping their mouths shut,” Geddie says. When an interviewer interrupts a client, either to defend the company’s actions or to attempt an explanation, credibility is lost and the client typically clams up, he says. Turning the interview into a sales call is a no-no. (Please see table on client-interview techniques).
