Profitable growth starts with employee empowerment and support
Ground-breaking research into the 5 key people drivers of the profitable growth cycle based on our experience from conducting over 1000 employee and customer surveys ...
Last week we were talking to a CEO who felt he needed a customer survey. His issue: the top six per cent of clients gave him 74% of revenue. Mix this fact with an economic downturn and you get a cocktail that keeps you up all night.
If just one of his key clients defected or went out of business it could cause lasting damage to his business. Damage his organisation may not easily recover from.
Let’s look at what’s involved in putting in place a customer survey program that could help you understand which key clients are at risk and what to do about it.
Asking customer survey questions yourself is less likely to get the frank and honest feedback you need. They may be telling you exactly what you want to hear while thinking the opposite.
Understanding which clients are at risk requires a clear and logical approach to gathering client satisfaction feedback. Our experience at Insync Surveys has found that the best way to identify who’s at risk is to:
Before you propose any new program you’ll need a business case. It’s important to quantify the investment you’re making in your customer survey compared to the benefits it will deliver.
The first step is to quantify the risk of losing one or more of your A grade or B grade clients. Given that many of your larger clients may provide revenue into the millions of dollars the impetus is clear.
Make a matrix with current sales value on one axis and share of wallet on the other. The biggest clients by sales value represent your highest risks, while the low wallet share clients represent the biggest opportunity.
Another big potential opportunity area is clients who have reduced their spend in the last two years. Some have shrunk and your share of wallet is the same, but others have gone elsewhere and might be open to coming back. Compare current sales data with that of two years ago and target these customers.
Turning these data into a business case isn’t easy, but you still have to do it. Every industry is different, but one client we know of uses the rule of thumb that 25% of clients could increase their spending by 50%; giving them a total revenue uplift of 12.5%. Of course, a well constructed customer survey can actually reveal these statistics.
Finally, a good customer survey should always ask for referrals. Ask us if you want to calculate a referral rate that you can then use in your business case.
Your return on investment estimates will flow from this business case.
Having a clear understanding of the outcomes from a customer survey project like this is very important and in our experience, considering what a research project won’t deliver is also worthwhile.
What you can expect:
What you should not expect:
Collecting customer feedback is a specialised skill. It may be gathered online via a survey, via telephone or even with a face-to-face interview. Insync Surveys provides all three of these client feedback options to listen and record information for your customer survey.
Many clients will tell an interested person about your organisation’s shortcomings long before they tell you. The good news is, if you get this information early enough, you will have time to make it up to them. Systematically seeking and acting on client feedback provides a sound foundation for building enduring relationships, a valuable asset in uncertain economic times.
Ground-breaking research into the 5 key people drivers of the profitable growth cycle based on our experience from conducting over 1000 employee and customer surveys ...
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