Colin Wahl. Seasoned entrepreneur Colin
Wahl has a long history
of business success. Colin is the founder and CEO
of Client Opinions, a company that provides an
automated, continuous means to capture and measure
customer feedback.
Most recently, Colin was an Adjunct Professor at the
University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business
School. Prior to that, he was founder/CEO
of
InvestorForce, Inc., a firm that provides technology
for conducting online investment research. Prior to
that, he founded and led research-based marketing
consulting firms. Earlier in his career, Colin was
a vice president at SEI Investments, and a brand
manager
with P&G.
Three Questions to Ask Your Customers
A company doesn't really have a choice about
whether or not it is going to get
customer feedback. Customers will give you their
feedback by firing you, keeping you out of an RFP or
in some other manner. The only choice you have is
how you choose to get customer
feedback.
You have a simple
decision: seek it proactively or deal with it
reactively. It seems to me to be a clear choice.
If you get feedback early and proactively, it's
actionable. If you get it late, there's not much you
can do about it; you've already eroded your
credibility, or worse, lost the customer's
business.
In my opinion (albeit a biased one), it's very
difficult, if not impossible, to collect unbiased
customer feedback on your own. There is a
real art to phrasing questions, structuring a
questionnaire, and interpreting the results so as not
to introduce statistical
bias that will skew your results. Customers are also
more open and candid in providing feedback to an
independent third-party expert.
Every successful firm should implement a
formal “Voice of the Customer” program that
captures
continuous, unbiased, and measurable feedback.
This program transforms customer research from an
ad hoc process to a continuous process of
proactively identifying new business opportunities and
uncovering issues before they become problems.
Three key questions can tell you a lot
about how you
interact with your customers,
how well they understand your business, and how you
can best improve what you do.
1. How satisfied are your customers? There
are
really two levels of satisfaction:
- Emotional Satisfaction: How satisfied are
customers with their relationship with your firm. Do
they
like you?
- Product Satisfaction: Do customers like
the
quality of your offerings? Having a good relationship
buys you some capital with the
customer; but that runs out quickly if your products
are poor.
2. Are you doing the right things right?
We are always surprised at how many businesses do
a
great job on things customers simply don't care
about! You
might be sinking money into something you think is
critical, but after asking your customers, find that
it's not something important to them. Ask your
customers what is important to them and invest your
money against those few things that customers deem
to be mission-critical.
3. How well do your customers know your
portfolio of
products and services? It's not uncommon to
see
less than a 50 percent customer awareness of a
company's products and services. If your firm
offers multiple products or services, take time
now
to understand customer awareness. If you have 10
products, and 3 years from now you learn your
customers were only aware of 2 of them, think of the
lost revenue you can never recoup. Existing clients
are by far the best prospects. They’re already
predisposed to buying from you and simply educating
them on your full range of offerings can often
generate qualified sales leads.
And last, remember that all of your competitors are
calling on your customers. Asking your customers
"what are competitors doing that we should be
doing?" is a great way to get new insight into your
business.
