By Sam Maniar
As I mentioned in my previous entry, one aspect of my role at PRADCO is business development. I quickly realized that my psychology training did not prepare me for such a role and decided to attend some sales and customer service workshops. One of the things that seemed to be mentioned repeatedly was the importance of getting feedback from your clients, so I came back to the office one day and suggested we do just that.
Now, it’s not that we hadn’t gotten feedback from our clients in the past. Because of the feedback our clients previously gave us, we made several changes, such as:
- Adding suggested interview questions to our Index reports;
- Adding coaching suggestions to our assessment reports;
- Making all of our reports easier to read and interpret; and
- Offering a high-potential coaching package.
We just hadn’t done it in a large-scale, structured process. I’d like to share with you some of what we learned from the data and some of my take-aways.
The first area that I was intrigued by was how our clients came to find out about us.
I was surprised to see that the majority (82%) of our clients either joined an organization that already used us or were referred by a colleague. This told me that it is extremely important to stay in touch with our clients and to stay at the front of their minds.
The second area of interest to me was how satisfied our clients were.
I was at first happy to see that 91% of our clients were satisfied. However, if we continue to maintain a 91% satisfaction rating and lose 9% of our clients each year, we would only retain 76% of our clients after 3 years. This would mean that we would lose ¼ of our clients by 2013!
The old adage about it taking 10 happy customers to refer you to just 1 person but only 1 dissatisfied customer to tell 10 potential customers makes a lot of sense with regard to these numbers.
So, 91% satisfied might be good enough for some companies, but it certainly is not good enough for PRADCO. As a result, we have started to contact everyone who ranged from “somewhat satisfied” to “very dissatisfied” to see what we could do. In many cases, the issue was a misunderstanding, but without the data and the follow-up call, we may have lost that person as a client. In other instances, we received great feedback on how to make our products and services even better.
The third area that stuck out was the way our clients utilize us.
To me, this was shocking. We knew that 91% of our clients were satisfied, and yet, most of our clients only know us for one thing: pre-employment assessment. We clearly need to do a better job of communicating the other ways we can help organizations, such as coaching, 360s, training, job modeling, etc. My guess is that many of our customers have no idea that we even offer these services.
In sum, I learned quite a bit:
- It is important to stay in touch with our clients.
- We need to continue to listen to our clients’ ideas on how we can improve.
- We need to do a better job of sharing and communicating additional ways we can be of service to our clients.
If you conduct customer satisfaction surveys, I’d love to hear what you have learned. Or, if you are a customer of ours and have additional feedback, we’d love to hear that as well. Until next week, take care.
Posted by PRADCO 
