In this blog I will explain how you can position yourself in the top 20 percent of plumbing, electrical or building services companies and stay there.
Why is that important? Well, if you consistently provide a level of service that exceeds customer’s expectations then your customer base effectively becomes your marketing.
When we have a particularly bad experience with a company – or a really great one – an emotional reaction often follows. We’re either exceptionally hacked off or extremely delighted. In both instances something then happens. We tell people!
But the experiences that are just OK, meet our expectations or are mediocre get forgotten. Perhaps because they didn’t evoke strong emotions. There is a great book by Ken Blanchard called Raving Fans, in which he talks about several fantastic experiences of customer service he has received…and it’s not about being in a 5 star hotel, it’s the fact that someone paid real attention to him as an individual and went above and beyond to serve him.
It is the thinking that sits behind something called ‘Surprise and Delight’ – this concept that if we look for opportunities to do just this at different stages of the customer journey, we will be catapulted into the top 20 percent of service providers. But if you’re going to embark upon such a strategy then you need to start by measuring where your customer service currently stands and I’ve talked about the importance of customer surveys previously.
A key question to ask is “On a scale of 1-10, how likely would you be to recommend our company to friends or a colleague”. This is known as the Net Promoter Score and is a benchmark used by lots of organisations to measure how many customers are in effect promoters of their brand or company.
Those who score the company a 9 or 10 are classed as promoters, 7-8 are considered passive and anyone who scores the company 6 or below is regarded as a detractor. All the detractors are added together and taken away from the promoters to give an overall NPS score. This is a great way of measuring if the experience you are providing is likely to be promoting your brand.
If this information strikes a chord with you then there are lots more top tips and practical advice in my book ‘Build and Grow – How to go from Tradesperson to Managing Director in the Construction and Trade Industries’ And you can buy it from Amazon via this link http://amzn.to/2CBok2L.