Create Magic By Sharing Customer Survey Data With Team members

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
-Ken Blanchard

No one knows more about your sales and service process than your customers.

Asking for customers’ feedback provides an incredible opportunity to highlight the good, the bad, and – all too often – the downright ugly side of our homebuyer interactions. These evaluations and comments are your portal into what can be an unseen world of customer discontent.

Consider this; Every one of us uses a mirror each morning to provide feedback on how we look to the outside world. In the same way this visual feedback helps us adjust our appearance, customer feedback helps your representatives adjust their behavior to deliver a more positive customer experience which drives future sales from referrals.

Can you imagine a restaurant owner ignoring YELP ratings? Or a hotel manager laughing off a series of consistently negative comments from recent Trip Advisor reviewers? These ratings (and complaints) are a gift! How else are we to know what customers are really seeing, and to understand what needs to be improved? It’s hard to ignore what you see in the mirror.

Utilize the Magic!

For these reasons, each customer-facing representative must be shown the ratings and comments from his/her customers. And here is the magic: No managerial input is required for this feedback to impact performance! In fact, managerial feedback has been shown to have less impact than customer feedback in quickly changing a team member’s behavior.

Most of your staff will immediately start adjusting when the customer feedback is specific and behavioral in nature: i.e. “Frequency of pro-active construction status updates” or “Returned my calls quickly” and not general, vague issues like “Communication” or “Professional Attitude”. And for those of your team members who choose not to make these adjustments…well, you have options.

Key benefit for managers: Customers’ evaluations – especially their comments – provide valuable opportunities for coaching and performance appraisal. The use of customers’ evaluations improves the objectivity necessary in the coaching process: “As your manager, this is not just my opinion, this is what 18 of your customers are saying.” Powerful stuff…

For these reasons, Eliant recommends you continuously share all your survey data and buyers’ comments with staff, vendors and trades.  And you’ll be better off being candid about all the feedback you receive…don’t share just the positive or just the negative evaluations.

Also remember that the most valid feedback is that which is corroborated by multiple customers’ ratings and comments…don’t get hung up on the ratings or comments of just 1 or 2 customers. Your representative will correctly view this as an invalid indicator of his overall performance.

To maximize the impact of this feedback, you’ll need to present findings in a way that allows staff, vendors, and trades to easily and frequently interpret those findings. Some examples:

• Eliant’s dashboards (updated daily) share the names and ratings of the highest and lowest rated team members in each department (for each survey question) and how they compare to thousands of other builders’ representatives.
• The “Spotlight Report” is basically an individual report-card for each field and lender representative with his ratings and rankings on each evaluation question; personal trends; buyers’ comments and suggestions.

Create a culture in which customer feedback is celebrated!

 

A series of new articles by Bob Mirman

Bob Mirman is CEO/Founder of 41-year old Eliant, with offices in California and North Carolina. He has written three complete issues of BIG BUILDER magazine, published two best-selling books and well over 160 articles in various building industry magazines. Using lessons learned during his first career as a Clinical Psychologist, Bob directs a seasoned team of Eliant’s Client Success Managers to assist homebuilders in managing their local reputations and driving sales from referrals.