How to know if you’re doing a good job for your customer
How to know if you’re doing a good job for your customer
The Issue:
With so many KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) available to the construction industry, how do you know if you’re winning or losing when it comes to satisfying your customer?
The Problem:
Customer satisfaction surveys are great, but are slanted by a recency cognitive bias – how they feel about you from some recent period of time only. Also, customer survey questionnaires are inherently qualitative, resulting in inconsistencies between customer data. It is possible that some customers could grade you higher, even though they may not like you as much, and vice-versa (some people never give a perfect score).
Then, there is trying to base this criterion on how much work you get with a particular customer, which is highly dependent upon market activity as well. In good market times, it takes less effort to get work due simply to supply and demand, whereas in bad market times, even the best customer service may not provide any fruitful results.
How then can you take any meaningful results to management to track how successful you are with your customer approach then?
The Solution:
This is not an area where hard data and statistic process control will give you significant information to manage your business with. Our business is pretty simple! It really comes down to the fundamentals of how you treat people. You already know what to do, so don’t let the latest technical stories of AI or big data change your approach to customers. If you think you’re not sure about what to do, look at your own subcontractors that you consistently use – especially not considering price, and write down why you work with each subcontractor. Look for repeating attributes. Now rank order what you feel is most important as to why you use who you do. Do items on this list show up on touch-point activities that you engage your customer with? That is what you should be focusing on! Make a list of the things you know move the needle and now start tracking your adherence to that. If you need some help to get started, consider some of these items as well. You can put some kind of KPI score next to these if you really wanted to, or simply keep looking to always improve each item and have others hold you accountable:
Responsiveness
Trust
Helpfulness
Technical knowledge
Estimating and other preconstruction assistance
Supporting their charities and interests
Keeping them looking good to their customer
High-performance, low-noise (drama)
By focusing on what you already know makes you successful in our people-business, you can keep this effort from getting complicated and spend more time on what truly moves the needle.