4 steps to boost customer referrals and sales
Creating positive customer experiences begins with conversation.
If customers have a positive experience working with you and your team, they’re more likely to recommend your business. Here is how to boost customer referrals and sales.
These four easy steps to boost customer referrals will help you create excellent customer experiences that lead to sales and more business.
Step one: Start a conversation
Creating positive customer experiences begins with conversation. Talk to your team about making great customer experiences a top goal. Second, reach out to your customers. Talking with them over lunch, or even during a phone call, creates a connection with them that will let you know your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
Step two: Survey customers
Once you’ve completed the job, survey your clients. Keep surveys brief − no more than 10 questions − and make them easy to answer. These two things alone will increase the response rate.
Write most of the questions so they can be answered on a five-point scale of zero to four. Using zero for the start of the scale let’s the customer know four is the best score. Leave some questions open-ended. Responses to those questions will be the most helpful to your team members who worked with customers.
Be sure to ask the likelihood your customer will recommend your firm in the future, how well your team communicated and the quality of the work.
Surveys should be done by phone, mail or email. SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are easy to use and easy for the client to fill out.
Survey consistently. This allows you to get enough feedback to improve your customer experiences, and ultimately your sales and profits.
Step three: Inform your team
Once you have the results of a survey, get them to the relevant employees or subs as quickly as possible. You can set up an email alert or an app so that team members get a survey’s results the moment it’s sent in by the customer.
Negative feedback allows you to fix a problem immediately. With a quick response, you can impress an unhappy customer. This turns a negative experience into a positive one, builds rapport with the customer, and increases his or her willingness to recommend you in the future.
Meanwhile, positive feedback allows your team members to celebrate a job well done. If a survey names a particular employee, it allows you to reward that person. Plus, it can even create friendly competition among your team.
Always share survey results with your staff. If the information doesn’t go to your team members, they can’t learn from them.
Step four: Set goals
Once you’ve been gathering data for a while, look for trends that will allow you to set realistic goals for your company. The goals could include improving something that your company hasn’t done well, or a decision to aim higher on the things it does well. By getting your team members to rally around your goals, you’ll improve your customer experience.
Construction firms that have lots of customers can set goals monthly, because they’ll see the trends more quickly. Smaller companies can set goals quarterly or annually. Setting goals won’t improve your company, but how your team works to meet those goals will.
−By Geoff Graham with Rachel Torchia
Geoff Graham is founder and CEO of GuildQuality. GuildQuality (guildquality.com) works with thousands of home builders, remodelers, and contractors to survey customers and understand the resulting feedback. Graham provided these expert tips during a recent Pro Construction Guide PROcast, a podcast just for pros.
