As you look to increase the value of your company, it’s critical to get input from key stakeholders about your company’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the most valuable components of stakeholder input is customer feedback.
For this Antiphony Insights, we tapped Colin Wahl, an expert in the science of collecting customer feedback. Colin is founder and CEO of Client Opinions, which leverages technology to obtain continuous customer feedback. Colin is authoring a white paper Best Practices for Online Customer Research. If you’re interested in receiving a copy of his white paper, contact us at insights@antiphony.com.
Three Questions to Ask Your Customers
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 timenow 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.
How Well Do You Know Your Stakeholders?
Rob Weber, Antiphonyrweber@antiphony.com
A critical step in the Antiphony Relaunch Methodology is a “Corporate Intelligence Audit.” This audit can be conducted quickly and efficiently and includes in-depth dialogue with the executive team, selected customers, and other key stakeholders.
The purpose of the audit is to gain a better understanding of the product, the strengths and opportunities in the market, and where the company stands on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle.
Your interviews should include one-on-one discussions with the senior management team members. Following these, stakeholder interviews should be held with customers and investors, but also distributors, suppliers, board members, strategic partners, and analysts.
The variance between the opinions of your own business leaders and your key stakeholders can be very instructive with regard to barriers to success and next steps to aligning the perceptions and messages associated with your company.
To learn more about conducting effective stakeholder surveys, contact us atinsights@antiphony.com.
Recommended Reading
Selling the Invisible : A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
Harry Beckwith (ISBN: 0446520942 )
This practical guidebook provides sound, actionable thinking that emphasizes the importance of customer research but goes beyond just research.