Customer Satisfaction Survey

How active listening can improve your business and produce more satisfied and loyal customers.

Customer satisfaction surveys are a way that we receive feedback from our customers. While the surveys are a good way to gauge our overall successes, we need to think about providing excellent service every time we meet with a customer – no matter how small the interaction may seem.

Our customers are the reason MileOne exists as a company. The key to keeping customers satisfied is communicating effectively with them. As they say, communication is a two-way street. When you communicate effectively with your customers, you build their trust. When you build their trust, they begin to believe in MileOne as a company, and are more likely to be satisfied with their interactions with you and our service. When customers are satisfied with our service, they become loyal to our brand.

Listening is the hardest skill to perfect with customers. It is important you truly understand their needs, wants and issues. Consider the following suggestions when interacting with your customers:

• Ask questions – don’t be afraid to repeat things back to your customers to ensure that you are on the same page, and what you think you heard is actually what they were saying to you.
   
• Put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would feel if you were in their situation – empathize with them. Empathy can help you gain a better understanding of the emotions behind their requests, and ensures you are taking the best care of them.
   
• Different customers prefer different ways of communicating, so you have to give them multiple options – we want what’s best for our customers. Avoid limiting ways that your customers can communicate with you. Not everyone prefers to communicate in the same way, so take care to not place limits around how they can reach you. 
   
• Because of the demands on everyone’s time, much of our communication ends up being via email or other written forms. Always remember that when you put something in writing, there are no physical or verbal cues for the reader to pick up on to understand your meaning.
   
• Be sure to take extra care when putting something in writing – ensure the point of your message doesn’t get lost. If the customer misinterprets something you say in writing, you will have a hard time regaining their trust.
   
• Face-to-face communication is always best, especially when someone is angry or upset. Speaking in person allows you to pick up on their body language and get a better understanding of their emotions. While this can come with challenges, having the ability to speak face-to-face generally enables you to come to a quicker, more satisfactory resolution of the issue.

Don’t wait for the results of a customer survey to gauge how the customer views their experience. Seize every opportunity to communicate with your customers effectively, and ask them how they are doing. MileOne employees are our best resource in promoting our brand. When you communicate successfully with our customers and they leave the store trusting in us, they continue to come back; they will refer their friends/family to us and they will return positive customer satisfaction survey results to the manufacturers.

Keep working hard to keep the lines of communication open with your customers and continue to build their trust and, as a result, increase their satisfaction and loyalty.