No Customers = No Business and Keeping your Team Happy

Do you assume you know what the customer wants? Or , maybe you are afraid of what they may say. What keeps those clients coming back? If you do not want to know what your customers and employees need or want, you might be spending lots of money on things that do not matter. Have you ever sat down and asked the people you work with what they think or need?

These are all important questions to ask yourself. Unhappy employees will not perform up to par and create a negative atmosphere that is highly contagious. This negativity can spread to your customers as well. This is especially true in the pet grooming industry. Owners want to feel they are leaving their beloved family members in good hands, not to someone who hates their job and may take it out on their pet.

For every one customer who contacts you with a complaint, there are 26 others who never say a word. They just don’t come back! So you think that you will just go out there and bring in more customers? Think about this. It costs 5x more to bring in a new customer than to keep an existing customer. Add to that this statistic. Your average unhappy customer will tell 8-16 others about their negative experience. However, with the rise of the social media phenomena, this could be exploded into 100’s or 1000’s!

If you take the time to resolve customer issues an average of 82-95% will continue to do business with you. It is critical to manage your customers’ experience. It is human nature to want to be understood and we appreciate being listened to.

Consider putting into place a system for getting feedback to get to the pulse of your customers and employees. Creating a survey will put you in touch with what people are thinking and need. Keep it simple, a few questions and leave room for comments. Questions like, What do you like most about our business/service…like least? Also, What changes can we make to serve you better? How can we improve upon what we do?

Once you get your feedback look for trends. You cannot solve everything at once. Find a strength and do more of it…focus on it! It might be a way to brand your service! Tackle the negative one by one. It may be necessary to create several surveys one for new customers, current/active customers, and inactive customers and then one for your employees.

There are options to conducting surveys. These can be in person, on the phone, paper surveys/mailings, or online surveys. The latter being the least time consuming and costly.

Do some research. Think about what questions you need to ask and conduct a survey that will help you keep your current customers happy so they will be excited about doing business with you and will tell all their friends. Find out exactly what it takes to keep your team happy and motivated so you will have a positive environment where the workers are productive and want to do their best for you.

I would love to see comments from anyone who has done any surveys and what the response was.

Online Surveys For Dummies