In today’s market, conducting a customer survey can really bring a competitive edge to your distribution company. Surveys are used to ask both your sales and your customer service employees how satisfied they think their customers are, while also asking customers themselves how satisfied they are. This 360-degree view of the data often has surprising results.
One of the most interesting findings of our survey data concerns the gap in the response results. Surprisingly, the gap is not that sales and customer service think they are doing better than they really are. Rather, it is actually that customers are more satisfied than the salesforce or the rest of your team knows. So, yes: your customer service may be better than you think!
This is not to say that everything is perfect and there is nothing to work on. Positive overall satisfaction, while great, is not sufficient enough as many dimensions are boiled down into one measure. So, surveys should also delve into the details, where there is often room for improvement of specific aspects of sales and customer service.
Celebrate the Wins, Work on Improvements
Still, positive overall satisfaction should not simply be glanced over. Use it for team building, morale building, and offering rewards. Celebrate all the wins, big and little. Use the results to show your team how they can be even better.
When your company is celebrating what they do well, it will show in morale. This winning attitude is very helpful in boosting how your people come across to customers. In turn, customers love dealing with people who think they’re winners.
Since interactions with customer service are usually about problems, it’s nice to have data to show that the effort, energy, and care that you put in is generally translating into better customer service than you might realize.
