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.