In the midst of a busy week, you read articles on asking your customers for feedback, building customer engagement funnels, getting feedback on your MVP and iterating on your service or product offering. Overwhelmed with the thought of implementing a system that works in your specific business use-case, you save the articles as bookmarks, hoping to set up the system next quarter.
At the heart of it, you wonder why do you need to get customer feedback when your product or service seems to be working well? And how do you implement a feedback strategy in a meaningful, sustainable, actionable way?
1) The WHY
Firstly, the need. Assuming that you’ve done market research or customer interviews prior to starting your venture, you may think you’ve got a good feel for how your customers view your offering. You probably do understand your customers to an extent but as your offering has been refined, as you hire new staff, as you tweak & improve your product/process, you’re left with a need to stay updated on what your customers think of you today, not yesterday. 
It’s at this stage that some companies feel the need to do a Google search for customer feedback software or customer satisfaction forms then start creating the survey to end all surveys. 58 questions that will only take up 45 minutes of their customer’s time. They create their email campaign, add the survey form link and send it out, hoping for more than single-digit engagement, never stopping to think of the double-digit annoyance to the rest of their customer base.
Is there a better way to build customer feedback into your process? 
There is, it’s not perfect, but it’s a solid start.
The baseline for customer feedback is the NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, a management tool developed in 2003 to gauge how loyal your customer’s are to your company.
It asks one simple question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? 
Respondents who score between 0-6 are labelled Detractors (not likely to boost your business), 7-8 are labelled Passives (indifferent customers) and 9-10 are labelled Promoters (potentially one of the 1000 true fans you need). The scores of your customers are viewed in aggregate for a company-wide view and individual responses can be responded to for follow-up.
2) The HOW
If you wanted to set up a NPS system in your business (after comparing NPS software systems), what are the steps?
To understand implementation, we need to put aside all the memories of counter-top perspex displays with dusty feedback forms that are only completed by irate customers. If you’re going to reap the benefits of double-digit responses and insights that can drive business growth, you need to ask at the right time, in the right way with the right incentive.
- The Right Time – by mapping out your customer experience journey, you’ll be able to identify the times in your process where the customer has received value and this goodwill is more likely to flow over into completing a survey.
- The Right Way – using modern customer feedback software rather than dusty feedback forms offered to busy customers (without a pen in sight), you can embed a link to your survey into your software, your email marketing campaigns or as part of your email signature.
- The Right Incentive – people are busy and don’t have time for your survey unless they have an incentive. The incentive may be a gift, an entry into a prize draw or a human-sounding/personal ask for feedback with a clear outline on how the feedback helps them in the future.
Implementing a NPS survey system is just the starting point for receiving data that you can use to respond to your clients and grow your business. Get in contact to discuss how Fullstack works with clients, utilising their feedback to deliver innovative accounting & advisory services.
