Last week, we sent a customer survey out to clients. No idea how many got through but the responses have given us an amazing insight into client perceptions of our business, our methods, practices & ultimately, product choice.
The feedback has been invaluable & much appreciated. After 16 yrs in this game, sitting in The Shed at the bottom of the garden banging out tweets & speaking to customers, I suppose we could get very stuck in our ways and tend to stay within our comfort zone. So it was refreshing to hear what clients had to say & on the whole confirmed that our methods & practices are appreciated & they right way for us as a business to manage projects.
It also highlighted one or two serious failings on our part. These have been rectified with instant effect. Basically, I need to have a scented candle in the shed so it doesn’t ‘stink of stale fags’ & to be more kind on social media towards our elected officials who I do have a tendency to call out when they vote for climate damaging policies or what appear to be practices that certainly look corrupt at the very least.
With regards to our process, we need to tighten up the communications & information given between me & the surveyor and from the surveyor to the installation team. Our very small, extremely experienced team has been in place for around 9 years now & with very few changes in personnel we automatically assume we all know our place & just trust each other to get on with it without interference. Most of you know we’re actually a collection of businesses, each a specialist in their own right. We work in collaboration and from now will be making that more obvious when dealing with clients.
99% of the time our processes and practices work according to the feedback, but we have let ourselves down on occasion and subsequently one or two clients down which will be addressed with new processes going forward.
All in all, it was a good exercise & it has made me have a long hard look at our business, but that in itself can never be a bad thing.
Several stand out results from the survey was on the marketing and how people found us. That just confirmed everything.
The market stall will be returning after 3 yrs gathering dust.
We didn’t realise how many people found us through the markets so we’d be silly not to get back out on the road again soon.
A well placed google advert/campaign pointed to our ever-updated website and most of all, keep up on our customer service as we get a 3rd of all jobs from word of mouth referrals and local community forums.
Writing for the local newspapers also helped a great deal over the last 3 yrs or so since becoming a regular columnist.
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