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Last week, I started as series of posts detailing my thoughts on how I would fix or turn around a business operation. Inspired by a promising MBA student that is doing an internship with us, I thought I would take a stab at a scenario she threw at me. Last week-ish we talked about financials.

This week, let’s talk about getting a handle on your customers – specifically their level of satisfaction. A few years ago I linked and commented on a great approach to customer satisfaction (csat). The original article talked about the 5 csat questions you will ever need but it was service operation focused. I think the questions are still very relevant and can be used in almost any business.

It is really 5 questions and a 6th which asks for verbal feedback. I also throw in another question – a net promoter score question. So really….7 questions. Here they are (in order of importance):

1. Courtesy of the Whomever You Interact With Most Frequently (support person, billing, customer service, field service, delivery person, sales person, account manager, CEO) – Your customer deserves and and expects to be treated in a courteous/professional manner. If you are scoring poorly here you need to make sure you have communicated the absolute importance of service and satisfied customers to your team. You may also need to specifically train customer service and customer experience skills.

2. Skills and Knowledge of Whomever You Interact With Most Frequently – While a courteous employee is nice, it won’t make a bit of difference if they can’t solve the customer’s issue. Your customers want confidence in the employee’s skills and knowledge to resolve the issue at hand. This is the best way to measure your team’s skill and knowledge level. Weaknesses here go back to the hiring and training process.

3. Quality of the Resolution – Again, courteous and knowledgeable employees are really nice to have, but they need to be actually addressing customer needs/questions/issues. Customers calling back for the same reasons over and over again is a customer that is going to churn on you.

4. Timeliness of the Resolution – Time is money! Fix your customer’s problem the first time they call. Two things happen if you don’t: you drive up your total cost per incident and you irritate your customer’s…see churn above. This is a process problem. Break it down step by step. No step is too small. Trouble lies in the handoffs.

5. Overall Experience – This is really the weighted average of the first 4. Keep in mind that customers will weigh each of the above differently. If you have a low score (bottom two boxes out of 5), CALL THAT CUSTOMER AND BEG THEM TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU CAN DO BETTER!

6. Additional Feedback – always, always, always allow your customer to give you open ended feedback. Let them vent. Not only will they tell you what is wrong (and right if you are lucky) they will tell you how to FIX IT.

Additionally, I have become a fan of the net promoter score. Net Promoter basically asks one simple question – “Would you refer us to someone else?” You take all the people that say yes and subtract all the people that say no and you end up with your score. It makes for a great measurable. And it is easy to create goals from it. If you’re NPS is 55 – set a goal to increase it to 60.

Ask these questions to your customers as soon as you get into your turnaround. Then do it quarterly. Track and compare results. If you have a lot of customers, you can outsource this task. If you have a manageable number of customers, keep it in house. If you have a handful of customers, you should be doing this yourself, on the phone or in person.

Each of the top 5 questions should get a scale of 1-5. 1 being completely off the rails broken and 5 being Superbowl win. I would label the boxes specific to each question. For example: Courtesy of the person would be a scale of Christian Bale/Mel Gibson to Miss Manners. Or you could let HR rule the world and do a scale of 1 to 5. If you do 1 to 10, then top two boxes are good. I like 1 -3 – easier to get through and eliminates ambiguity.

Ideally, every customer gets some kind of sponsor. Positive responses should get a follow up of thanks. Negative responses should get a follow up to work through the issues. It doesn’t even have to be an “executive” sponsor. In fact, you could kill two birds with one stone here….you can find out which of your employees are engaged too. (See next week’s installment.)