One of our biggest takeaways working in this space continues to be this:
✨ If you show people respect, they will show you it back ✨
It’s a lesson we probably all apply in our personal lives, but one that seems to be forgotten in the business world.
In particular, when it comes to customer relationships, it seems that businesses continue to do things like:
- Underfunding customer service
- Disempowering frontline teams (account managers to customer success)
- Collecting customer feedback and not acting on it
All these things allow customer relationships to fall by the wayside.
They don’t show that you care and they, therefore, enable the situation where an important chunk of revenue will churn each year—likely without much of a discussion in advance.
We had the CustomerGauge Awards last week (round-up of what we learned here).
During one of the acceptance speeches, we heard something spoken back to us that we’ve been teaching our customers for years:
“[When closing the loop] the most common response we get is ‘oh, I didn’t think anyone actually read my responses’. We’ve even had messages from non-responders we followed up with who said ‘you know what, next time I’m going to respond because I didn’t realize anyone did anything with the surveys’.”—Gemma Beddow, Briggs Equipment
Case in point.
Most people are so used to filling out surveys—giving feedback—and hearing nothing in return, that they don’t bother doing it anymore.
And voice of customer teams wonder why their survey response rates are so low?
In our Best Practice Guide for Closing the Loop, we share some original data from our own customers:
“Businesses who closed the loop after running an NPS survey had three times the number of promoters the next time they ran the survey (compared to those who didn’t have a closed-loop process).”
