A few weeks ago I ran an article about tracking customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) System. It is one of the systems we use at our business to both monitor our customer satisfaction levels and to also respond to complaints. After learning about it, one of our readers wrote in and asked:
“Seems if the real goal is to find problems (since 95% will be positive), I feel that the current system you use is unlikely to necessarily do the job well enough — some customers will be too timid to say something and hand a card back to an employee — but the mail is too slow and most will not fill them out — could be an e-mail to them would provide the opportunity for them to comment about their visit in a safe setting.”
His point is fantastic, and I thought it would be a great basis for this week’s article. First, 95% of the cards you receive will probably not be positive. The goal at our facilities is to keep our NPS Score in the 90% range. This is a lofty goal, as the national average for NPS Score ranges between 11-60% depending on the industry. Nonetheless, it is a goal that when our entire team is focused on it, we tend to make happen.
Over the course of the last five years monitoring this for businesses, I have found that a large majority of the customers who are satisfied with their visit do not want to take the time to fill out the “comment card” they are handed at checkout. But when you have a truly unhappy guest at one of your facilities, many times, they will take the time to let you know they are unhappy by filling out the card they are offered at checkout and dropping it in the comment box .
Utilizing comment cards, however, is not the only method you should have in place to ensure you are doing everything within your power to turn unhappy customers into raving fans. There are lots of other tools you can put into place. Let’s examine two of them now.
Daily Customer Emails
In a world where online communication is king, you should be collecting email addresses from all of your customers and sending emails asking how the service they received at your business was.
One important thing to note is every response you get (positive or negative) warrants a reciprocal response back from you. Positive responses can be used as testimonies on your website and in social media. Negative responses should be looked into immediately and addressed with a phone call back to the patient (not an email) to work on a resolution.
In addition to helping you solve patient complaints you might not otherwise have known about, collecting email addresses has an added benefit. Each person who gives you their email address should become the start of list building for your weekly or monthly patient newsletter.
Customer Call Backs
Another thing to implement is calling customers back to ensure that their visit to your facility met their expectations. This may not work for all businesses, but if it works in your industry, think about how it will set you apart from your competition.
In summary, customer satisfaction should be the premiere focus of your marketing plan. Word of mouth marketing is vital to your company’s financial success. These are just three of the many tools available to help you ensure you are doing everything within your power to keep the things customers are saying about you positive.
