When I was young I wanted to be a scientist.

You come up with an idea, create a hypothesis on how the idea would work, then you go and test it.

I would run my own experiments.

Can an Ant be killed with using the sun and a magnifying glass? (I was a little jerk when I was 6.)

Can buy a pack of gum and trade it for lunch at school?

How many girls do I have to ask on a date before they say yes? (I don’t want to reveal this number.)

There was always something I was curious about.

That’s the best part of my job. Helping clients come up with hypothesis on the best ways to improve User and Customer Experience, testing them out, and watching the data roll add up, so we can make smarter decisions.

I realize how hard it is to cultivate the scientist mindset in your own business.

Your business is so loveable, hard, and sweet. How could you ever cut it open and dissect it?

There needs to be an emotional detachment from your business that all owners need to have. If something isn’t working for you then you can’t force the product or service on your customers. You need to pivot and adapt to the market.

That requires taking a hard look at the data and making sure you are making good decisions.

That’s where I come in.

I take an x-ray of your website and show you what needs help and how you can fix it. I’m not attached to your business and it’s easier for me to be objective.

I would like to help more purpose driven companies.

I do this for people in the Domino Connection community. If you want special offers from me just join in on the updating fun and I’ll let you know next time I have a special offer to help you boost your Customer and User Experience.

Is there some big thing you’ve always wanted?

You might want to buy a beautiful island in the Caribbean. That would be cool, but you can’t have it all though, can you?

Just like you can’t build a great business and make every single customer happy.

It’s impossible, right?

Don’t think too much about it right now.

I want you to focus on this moment.

There will always be an unhappy customer at some point. There will always be something you can’t buy. Like your own island.

You can and should focus on this moment.

Right now.

It seems like something little, but it’s where every action start.

In the present moment.

The more actions you take, the closer you can get to making your dreams come true.

Big Picture

Maybe 80% of your customers give you a rating of an 8 or higher. No company in the history of the world has received all 10’s. You’ll never have 100% satisfaction from your customers. That’s ok. Reasonable expectations are a good thing.

80% at a 8 or higher is a great start.

How do you even know if every customer is really happy?

You don’t, but you need to try.

How do you find out?

You need to ask.

That’s why a customer feedback loop is so important.

I have a customer that is getting off the charts great feedback. Almost 10’s across the board. They like all of us aren’t perfect.

They got two 2s and they were able to solve both customer’s issue quickly. That’s the beauty of asking and tracking the responses. You can to make the customer experience better as well as improve upon common issues that keep occurring.

A customer feedback loop is an ongoing conversation with your customers about what is going well and what could be improved.

The higher the quality feedback you can gather from your customers the easier it is to figure out what you can do better.

The hard part will be getting people to give you their time.

Most Important Part

The most important part of this process is to continue to gather feedback so you can compare it to past feedback.

Are you improving upon your customer experience?

The only way to know is to keep tracking and review on a regular basis. I advise most of clients to either review their feedback once a week, a month or once a quarter. This will of course depend on the type of business you run. You want to find a comfortable balance for the customer as well as for you and your team.

The idea is to make it so simple that they are willing to use their valuable time to give you feedback.

That’s why I use the Domino Promotion Sequence (DPS), based off of Net Promoter Score.

Each person who loves what you do will promote you to their friends. They’ll tip like dominoes from one person to the next.

It’s a system that helps you get better feedback and use it to improve your User Experience and Customer Experience.

There are a couple key components to DPS.

The first part is the rating from 0 – 10

Breaking Down the Scores

Here is how people who take your survey are classified.

10 and 9 – Promoters
8 and 7 – Passives
6 thru 0 – Detractors

These classifications are a good guideline. Every score is important. Each person’s feedback should be responded to and each person should be made to feel important.

Many times you can turn them from a detractor or passive into a promoter of your company.

The 2nd step is finding out why they feel this way.

The 3rd step is understanding why they choose to buy from you.

It’s this part that will help you understand their main pain points and how to improve the copywriting on your website.

The 4th step is finding out what you could do to improve upon their experience.

There is always something to improve. Even if they give you a rating of a 10 there is always something you could have done better.

Keep a Positive Perspective

You shouldn’t get too high or low about the feedback that you receive.

Sometimes the feedback can be hard to hear, especially if the customer gives you a low score, so never take any of the feedback personal.

Most of the time people just want to be heard. When you reply back to someone they will be thrilled that you actually care about the product and want to improve upon their experience.

Most of the time you want to hear multiple complaints a few times before you start taking action to improve it.

If you try to fix every problem/issue that occurs you’ll wear yourself and your staff out. You want to focus on the most important issues at all times.

Remember you can’t make every customer happy, but you can listen to every customer and make them feel important even if you can’t always solve their problem.

My father was a tough man. Every time we tried to tell him what we thought about his rules. We were met with a stern look.

His eyebrows would come together, asking us, do you really want to go there?

Most of the time we didn’t.

I eventually stopped trying.

As I got older I started to stretch my boundaries, but I of course never felt heard.

Now he’s much more open to feedback. How I wish I had my “today” father when I was 12.

This is how many customers feel about giving feedback to a bad experience.

Customers are afraid to give feedback because they think it will fall on deaf ears.

Customer Survey

Trust is built with consistency. – Lincoln Chafee

Last month I set-up a survey for a client. He showed me a survey he did last year and wow, it was a cluster of information.

I asked him, point blank…

“Were you able to use the data to improve sales and customer experience?”

“I think so,” he said.

I smiled. I was pretty sure he read the data, made some guesses, and some changes, but that was it. He shot from the gut.

Most people gather customer feedback, read over it and make guesses on how to improve. They do this because they gather too much data and aren’t consistent with how they collect it and use it.

The same goes with reviewing your web analytics. You can only make improvements to your website if you are looking at what is working well and what isn’t.

I always tell my clients:

Keep it simple, so it’s useable.

It’s why I use DPS. The Domino Promoter Sequence, based off of NPS. It’s a simple way to start collecting customer feedback that they can use to improve their business.

It allows you to keep track of how people rate you on a scale of 0 – 10.

10 being amazing and 0 being terrible. This allows you to calculate your Net Promoter Score. You subtract any percentage of people from 0-6 away from people who gave you a 9 or 10. This is your DPS.

Here is how people who take your survey are classified.

10 and 9 – Promoters
8 and 7 – Passives
6 thru 0 – Detractors

It’s a simple concept. It’s quantitative and helps you keep track of how your company is viewed by your customers.

Break Down

Promoters love you. Think of them as raving fans.

Passives aren’t emotionally connected.

Detractors are haters. They bad mouth you every chance they get.

Depending on the score they give will determine how you respond to them. The promoters want to share you with their friends and you need to encourage them to do so. Passives can be turned into promoters if you create a smart response to them. Detractors can be turned into passives and sometimes even promoters if you are willing to listen and try to make their experience with your product or service better.

Then the follow-up questions are important to help you gather feedback that you can use to improve your website.

This is the qualitative portion of the survey and just as important because it’s this feedback that will help you improve your customer experience and the user experience on your website.

The keywords that keep popping up again and again are the ones that you need to use more often or less often, depending if it’s a positive or negative rating.

Here is customer feedback data from a National client:

It’s important that you don’t try to compare yourself to these examples. Your company creates a unique experience that you should measure and try to improve upon every single day.

That’s a score of 48.5.

Here is a pie chart from a local business in town:

My favorite part is that DPS makes it easy to review each month. You can just review your score so you can see the upward or downward trend. You can also did into the why and get more detailed feedback.

That’s a score of 100. Now that’s amazing. Even with the low number of people who filled out the survey.

Here is a pie chart from a coaching business:

That’s a score of 52.6.

Here is feedback from an email series that we set-up:

That’s a score of 26.7.

Scoring

The score is calculated by subtracting the Detractors from the Promoters. A business could have a negative score if they have more Detractors than promoters.

In these examples every company was in the positive. Which is very good. Anything above a 0 is good. Anything above a 50 is excellent. The key component is to keep track of your score each month or quarter and track your progress. Are you improving?

See how simple this is to start your survey?

You need to strive to make your customer feedback surveys easy to fill out and maybe even more important, make them your surveys simple so it’s easier to extract the data you need to improve.

Simple and easy to fill out doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful. When done right the DPS sequence of 4 questions can improve you business very quickly.

The most important part of DPS is using this information on a regular basis to help you improve your business. That’s where I can help. If you need to get better feedback from your customers to improve your customer experience and website experience then we should set-up a short phone call. I will help you collect this information, filter it, and use it to help you improve your customer experience.

Last week I went into a restaurant and had a nice meal. The waitress was top notch, but the food was average.

She asked us why we stopped in. She was attentive and asked us if we needed anything. Refilled our drinks quickly.

All the traits of a good waitress.

When our meal was finished, we asked for the check.

With the check came a comment card.

It made me smile.

It wasn’t a very long survey, 5 questions, but my meal was just ok. I would have rated it about a 7.

I didn’t feel the need to say anything.

I paid my check and left. The comment card just sat in the check fold.

I wondered how many people actually filled out the comment card. 1%, maybe 2%.

Improving Customer Feedback

This is where most companies go wrong.

They forget the most important part of getting customer feedback.

Show them how much you care about their experience by asking for their feedback and then do the most important part of the ask…

Explain why their feedback is important to you.

That’s it.

Now getting them to listen, understand, and believe is why each step matters.

Show them how much you really care about improving your business.

This usually gets harder the bigger a company gets unless you build the importance of feedback into the culture of the company. You show them by being transparent about your process with your employees, your website and email copy, and on social media.

If the waitress would have asked us to fill out the comment card I would have said yes. I would be obliged to give my feedback.

She didn’t.

So I didn’t.

Ask the Right Way

Now if she would have asked me for feedback and explained, how each comment card is read by Matt Mullin the Vice President of operations and his team, to create the best experience possible, then she would have had my interest.

I would want Matt to know what I thought of the service I received at the restaurant. I probably would have given the restaurant an overall 8. The service made up for the average food.

The simple act of telling me why they want the information made me 10 times more likely to give them feedback that they could use.

Now look at how you garner feedback from your customers. Do you do it through email, comment card, in person…?

Or maybe you don’t ask for feedback at all.

If you don’t have a feedback system in place then we really need to talk.

I find that customer feedback is the best place to learn about your customers and use it to write sales copy on your website. That’s a little copywriting tip that will go a long way to helping you improve your website conversions.

If you do have a feedback system in place then it’s how you ask that will make all the difference in the quality of feedback that you receive. There are different levels of feedback. Quality customer feedback is part art and part science. When done well, it will be a game changer for your company.