Monday, December 22, 2008

Customer Retention Tip #1

Navigating the Happy Holiday Message

Clients often wonder the best way to wish their clients a happy holiday at this time of year. With the potential social, cultural, and religious potholes, it is all too easy to drive your customer relationship directly into a ditch by using the wrong words. In regards to the design of your holiday cards, we suggest winter scenes or earth pictures. Telcare suggests sticking to a few non-denominational words on these cards:

Happy Holidays
Peace on Earth
Happy New Year

When speaking to or emailing your customers in the final weeks of the year, once again, sticking to Happy Holidays and Happy New Year truly works best. You will never insult someone when wishing them a Happy New Year. Also, as your holiday client gift, if your company donates to a charity on behalf of your clients, Telcare suggests that the donations go to non-denominational charities such as food banks, hospice, animal shelters, etc. Why all the political correctness? Remember that it only takes one insulted customer to turn away at least nine potential customers from your company! So, Happy Holidays from Telcare, and to all a goodnight! Oops!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Survey Tip #2: Retaining Dissatisfied Customers

Telephone Survey Negative Response Alerts

What happens when a customer provides a negative response during a telephone survey? Hopefully, you have hired a firm like Telcare that quickly alerts you via email. We call them Hot Emails. For example, let's say your telephone survey includes a question asking your customer to rate your salesrep's knowledge and professionalism on a scale of one to five, with five being very satisfied. If you set your negative response alert threshold to two, you will receive an alert for any customer responding with a one or two on the five-point scale. This gives you the opportunity to respond directly to that customer within minutes or hours of that customer giving you a negative rating.

Why is this important? 95% of dissatisfied customers will do business with you again, if you resolve their issue quickly.

The best way to set up the alerts is to have them go to a distribution group of your staff based on your best guess as to who would likely deal with the negatives. You should use a group, because if the one person you assigned to receive the alerts is sick one day, you just blew your opportunity to impress your customer with your quick turnaround time.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Survey Tip #1: Starting at the End

Building a New Customer Satisfaction Survey by Starting at the End

In my free guide, 7 Simple Steps to Successful Surveys, the first step tells you to start at the end. What I mean is that before you can start to build a survey, you need to first think about what you are going to do with the survey responses. Here are the three phases of data receipt you can expect during many survey projects, especially telephone surveys:

1. Individual negative response alerts received during the survey
2. Initial quick read summary at conclusion of survey
3. Final analysis and full reports

Each of these phases are equally important and deserve your full attention and care. Make a detailed plan to address how you will deal with each phase, and share that plan with the staff who will be involved in carrying it out. For the second and third phases, include in your plan reactions to both positive and negative data. Check out my free guide for detailed ideas.