I got bad service today, and I lied about it.
I live in a small town, with a very limited number of restaurants. So, when a new one opens, it’s a big deal. I wanted to love it. I want more places like this to exist near me. But…
- Service: meh.
- Food: yuck.
- Ambiance: not good.
But here’s the kicker. I gave a decent tip, and when I was asked “How was everything?”
I totally lied. I said “Okay.” I’m just never going back again.
I know that running a business like that isn’t even as hard as a countertop shop. Even though you’ve got the sales & customer service in the front, and the production in the back. With a countertop shop there are way more moving parts: templaters, installers, fabricators, material vendors….
How to solicit honest feedback?
Lots of folks use a method like the Net Promoter Score to figure out how they’re doing. The basic idea is that you want to measure who your super-fans are, and make sure to keep creating more of them. You’ve probably seen this: “How likely, on a scale of 1-10, are you to recommend X to a friend?“. This tends to work decently because:
- It’s anonymous, or mostly anonymous
- It’s easy – one or two clicks
- I’m not worried about hurting your feelings
We’ve got evidence that thousands of companies don’t hate us – they keep giving us money. But, it’s really easy to lose sight of the fact that we’re dealing with humans… and we’re probably not doing the best job we could be.
So, how are we doing?
Create your own user feedback survey
There’s a lot more we need to do to keep improving our customers’ happiness. But, this is a start.
Are you surveying your customers?
Creating your own survey like this is ridiculously easy. I used a free SurveyMonkey form, which took me less than 5 minutes and $0.00 to create. The question is, “Do you want to hear the bad news?” If you’re not already measuring your customers’ satisfaction, there’s no excuse.
If you need help making your own customer survey, let us know and we can send you more details about how to create a free web form like this one.
Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. CounterGo is countertop drawing, layout, and estimating software. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you. We also sponsor StoneTalk, the podcast for countertop fabricators.
