If you’re providing a good customer experience, odds are that you’re running a successful company. Gathering and utilizing customer feedback is vital for businesses, as it is also a strategic competitive advantage that allows companies to pursue more profitable businesses. Property maintenance companies in particular are in constant interaction with their customers and customer focus is emphasized in day-to-day operations.
Leaving feedback should be made as easy as possible for customers. According to research, only less than 5% of your customers give occasional feedback. Even if a customer is disappointed, in 95% of cases, he or she will not give any feedback to your business, because it is often much easier not to provide feedback. Unfortunately, for this reason, service companies often do not have the opportunity assist disappointed customers.
Before we jump into the blog post, it’s also good to re-cap the difference between customer satisfaction and customer behavior. Companies typically have a multitude of tools to measure customer behavior, for example, how long customers spend on your website and what their bounce rate is. You might be looking at metrics such as average time customers spend on your website- for this example, let’s say customers spend an average of 6 minutes 24 seconds on your site. You might interpret that as a positive metric- your customers find your content interesting and are staying on your website for a long time, right? That could be the case, or alternatively your customers have to stay on your website for a long period of time, because they aren’t finding what they need easily. That’s the difference between customer behavior and customer satisfaction- the only way you can find out how your customers are feeling is by asking them, whereas their behavior can be analyzed without their feedback.
5 easy ways to collect customer feedback in property maintenance
1. Add feedback forms to your website
Giving feedback should be made easy and effortless. When customers do want to leave feedback, they should be able to locate the company’s contact information and feedback forms quickly and effortlessly. When the customer is able to find contact information quickly, he or she is left with the feeling that the company wants to hear from the customer – whether the feedback is good or bad.
2. Leave feedback forms at the customer’s property
The basic nature of the maintenance business includes visits to the customers property. When a service technician visits a customers’ property to perform a maintenance gig, he or she has an excellent opportunity to ask for feedback from the customer. For example, maintenance companies can leave a note, that details the maintenance work completed, to individual customers. This note should also provide a clear path for leaving feedback. For example, “We have taken repaired your AC on 21.12.2021. The service technician was John Smith. How well did we succeed? You can leave us feedback at xxx ”. Alternatively, if any maintenance work that effects a whole apartment building needs to be completed, a feedback form can be distributed to the mailboxes of all residents and a mailbox left in the lobby to collect the filled in feedback forms.
3. Take special care of key accounts
It’s important to have personal discussions with your key accounts at least once a year on how the collaboration over the year period has gone. Customer satisfaction calls at the end of the year should be the norm. A personal phone call or meeting shows your customers that you care. When calling a key account directly, it is much easier for them to express their opinions on service received and pitch development ideas- this gives you as the Service Provider free product development ideas through user insights!
4. Make giving feedback easy
It is a good idea to send a feedback questionnaire to each customer via email from time to time, where customers can quickly answer a single question or a few questions about your service. If possible, you shouldn’t even redirect customers to feedback form, rather embed the question(s) directly into the email. This might be more work for you- we all know how easy it is making a Google Forms Survey, but you will get a much higher interaction rate, if customers are able to answer questions directly in the email with a single click. Also consider adding an incentive, for example, draw movie tickets between everyone, who takes part in the survey.
5. Use a property maintenance management system
One of the fastest ways to collect customer feedback is to send a feedback survey directly to the customer via a property management system, when a service technician marks a job as completed. For example, you can create an automatic email or text message acknowledgment with a link to a personalized customer feedback form. This way you’re collecting relevant feedback, because you know that the person replying to the feedback has been in touch with your company and it’s services recently.
Why collect customer feedback?
What you measure is what you get – if a company doesn’t measure customer feedback, they can’t detect and develop potential flaws in service processes. At the end of the day, it is good for companies to remember that satisfied customer are the path to success.
The company should be proactive about feedback and accept the customer experience – be it good or bad. It is worth responding to feedback quickly and personally. Feedback can be used to make service processes and products even better and smoother. For example, a well-managed complaint is an opportunity to deepen the customer relationship – if handled promptly and fairly, the customer relationship will often become more committed. Improved products and service levels often bring more customers.
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