How will you know if your new ‘Restore Customer Faith’ process actually works?

Hey there,

Although making an unhappy human being happy again is obviously a right and proper thing to do in and of itself, you’ll want to know that you and your team are doing that to the best of your abilities.

It’s also good to know that the benefits of doing the right thing will be shared by your business.

So in this newsletter we’ll look at:

How to monitor how complaints are handled - without micromanaging your people
Setting a baseline so you can see which direction things are moving in
Where to look for the impact on your business

How to monitor how complaints are handled - without resorting to micromanagement

Once you’ve trained your team to run your new ‘Restore Customer Faith’ process, you want to be able to see how well they’re doing, and how well it's working for your business.

As you know I’m a big fan of ‘admin as a side- effect’ - ensuring that a process leaves a trail of useful data without any additional effort from the person running it. We’ll cover this later in this newsletter.

I’m also a big fan of sampling - taking a closer look from time to time so you know exactly what’s going on. This can be especially useful in the adoption phase of your new process, when people may feel unsure of themselves.

Early intervention and support through sampling helps to reassure you (and them) without feeling like micro-management.

There are a few ways to do it, each of which has it’s place:

You could arrange to ‘accompany’ someone as they deal with an unhappy customer. You give notice, so they are prepared, because you are not so much checking what they are doing as monitoring the reactions of the people they interact with as they do it.

You could watch from a distance, keeping the person you’re observing unaware. This feels creepy but can sometimes be the only way to know what actually happens when nobody is watching. To me this feels just about get-awayable-with as an infrequent occurrence, carried out in a proper spirit of mutual gain.

Or you can ‘mystery shop’ – the non-creepy equivalent of observing covertly, from a distance. Better yet, get a professional to do it for you on a regular basis.

One thing to bear in mind:

People have their own individual preferences for how they get convinced about something. Both in how they like to receive evidence, and how many times they need that evidence to be repeated before they are convinced.

First the 'how'. Some people prefer to see a thing happen, others are OK to read about it, or hear about it, while yet others prefer to experience doing it for themselves before they believe it.

This is why it’s a good idea to expose people to multiple ways of taking in a process during training (Read, Watch, Have a Go)

The ‘how many times’ can range from once, to a few times, to never. Fortunately most of us fall into the ‘few times’ camp - which is why the Practice part of training works so well.

But do be aware of your own preference.

If you’re a ‘once is enough for me’ person, make yourself sample regularly, or you’re likely to miss opportunities fro improvement.

If you’re a ‘never quite convinced person’, restrict yourself to sampling regularly, but not too frequently, or you’ll make people feel like you’re surveilling or micro-managing them.

Setting a baseline so you can see which direction things are moving in

To be honest, if I’d thought about this sooner, I would have positioned this newsletter earlier in the sequence, probably second or third. Still, it is what it is and I am truly grateful that you are so tolerant of me thinking things through in public as it were. And I can put the sequence right when I write the booklet!

If you’ve done the work for ‘Know you Numbers’ you already have at least one baseline figure to work with:

Customer Lifetime Net Profit

What else you could easily measure:

No of Complaints

If you’re already logging complaints, they’re easy to count.

If you don’t already have figures for the number of complaints you receive per year/per half-year/per quarter/per month or even per week consult with your team and use you collective ‘gut feel’ to come up with an estimate. It is likely to be good enough.

What really matters is what happens going forward.

Customer Net Promoter Scores

If you already do this, brilliant. Otherwise, you could ask every current client to give you a Net Promoter Score to set your baseline.

Here's how:

Ask each customer:

“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, family member or fellow business?”

Ask them to score you between 1 and 10, where 1 = ‘I wouldn’t let anyone I care about touch you with a barge pole’, and 10 = ‘I can’t help myself, I refer you to everyone I know’

Then ask the open question: "Why did you give that score?"

Followed by this question: "If there was one thing we could do to improve the score you gave, what would it be?"

Calculating the score:

Let the total number of replies = 100%

Work out the percentage of people who scored you 9 or 10.

Work out the percentage of people who scored you between 1 and 6.

Subtract the second percentage from the first to get your overall score, as a percentage. The nearer you are to 100%, the better.

And just to make it really easy, I've made you a simple calculator for working out your result.

Aside from getting some data to use as your baseline, this is a brilliant excuse for making contact with customers you may not have spoken to for a while, and an amazing source of feedback you can use to prevent future complaints.

If you'd rather not ask your customers yourself, get a third party to ask on your behalf. they are often able to get more honest and more comprehensive answers.

Where to look for the impact on your business

I never actually see the slugs devastating my dahlia cuttings overnight, but I know they’ve been by the effects on my dahlia cuttings.

I can also see exactly where they’ve been, by the beautiful silvery trails they leave behind them.

I can see where they struggled, where they went round in circles, and how they eventually got to their target.

So I can see where I might intervene to stop them.

Like my slugs, your business processes leave two kinds of evidence on your business.

The results, and the trails that lead up to the results.

So what are the results you could track for ‘Restore Customer Faith’?

Here are a few:

The number of complaints you receive per time period. The number should go down over time, although it might initially rise as people realise that there is a point to giving feedback rather than simply giving up on you.

The number of referrals per customer per time period. Again, this figure might go up, even if the number of complaints goes up, because people can be happy to share the story of a wrong put right, as reassurance to the friend they are referring.

Your Customer Lifetime Net Profit values. Even taking into account the cost of restoring a customer’s faith in your business, I would expect this number to go up over time.

Your Net Promoter Score. This should go up over time - provided you don’t hassle your customers by asking for it too often.

I don’t know about you, but I find being asked to score every parcel delivery, or every chat interaction a bit much.

So be sparing with your requests for scores.

Good times to ask are when you are communicating with a customer anyway because you’ve hit a meaningful point in your Keep Promise process. Such as when you’ve just finished a significant piece of work or reached an important milestone, or when they are transitioning to a slightly different relationship, such as moving from ‘build’ to ‘maintenance’.

What would you track?

And what are the slug trails?

Your Complaint Log and Follow-up Checklists

The Process Problem Logs for your ‘Restore Customer Faith Process’

Your team’s willingness (or otherwise) to handle complaints.

What would you track?

That’s it for this newsletter, and for this little series on handling complaints, or as I prefer to think about it, restoring customer faith.

Here’s what I hope you’ve learned today:

Sampling is an effective way to monitor how any process is going, because it provides reassurance to both parties without micro-management.
Don’t worry about not having all the data yet. Estimate a baseline and start collecting. Data will soon build up.
The best feedback on your business is the feedback you don’t have to collect - because it shows up in what your customers actually do.

Here’s what I hope you’ve learned from the series:

Complaints are almost always about caring. Handled well, they become a valuable source of feedback for improvement and an opportunity to turn a customer into an advocate for your business.
Anyone can handle a complaint well, given an understanding of what’s really going on inside the human in front of them, and a process to follow that uses that understanding, together with useful information about what value a customer brings to the business, and therefore what the business can afford to spend in order to keep them.
Looked at as a recurring process, handling complaints can actually become proactive. By thinking about what might go wrong, you can effectively design out complaints before they happen, while still retaining the ability to deal positively with complaints you couldn’t possibly foresee.
This means handling complaints is a critical part of how you improve the most important process your business runs - how you Share and Keep your Promise to the people you serve.

And here’s what I hope you’ll do next:

Set the baseline for where your business is now regarding complaints.
Get familiar with your business’s net profit margins, both per product and per customer lifetime.
Customise the universal ‘Restore Customer Faith’ process with your own net profit figures, your own Per-Product Complaint Scenarios and your own words.
Pre-empt complaints by making the process pro-active instead of simply reactive.
Train your team to run the customised ‘Restore Customer Faith’ process.
See what happens when they run it instead of you.

If you’d like help implementing this for your business, get in touch.

Next time I’ll tackle one of the problems you raised - putting together a process for giving quotes or making a proposal, so that someone else can do it while you’re away.

Thanks for reading!