If your business has been doing marketing for any length of time, or you have been one of my clients for more than 10 minutes, you know several things for sure. When it comes to your marketing and advertising budget, it is way cheaper to keep a current client than it is to obtain a new one, through any other source. The next thing is that the best kind of lead, by far, is a referral from another customer. Especially for contractors, those kind of referrals branch out like wildfire to friends and relatives. One sincere, glowing referral from a thrilled customer is worth far more that 10 (or more) hours of advertising coming from a company. They are more believable, and they come from people that their friends and relatives already trust. It is, and always has been, my opinion that customer satisfaction surveys are essential to any company that cares about it’s reputation, and absolutely should be a healthy part of any customer retention program.
To that end, I have received permission from one of my clients (and lifelong friends) to talk about his company and how they have their customer satisfaction survey program and process set up. He and his company, by far, have the best and most successful program I have ever seen. I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. It’s all them, and how they have made it a company culture which serves their clients, the company and its’ employees. It is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved. To preface their program and how they do it, let me tell you a little bit about the company.
The name of the company is Hollywood Crawford Door Company. They simply sell, service and repair garage doors and openers from quality manufacturers. They are in the major metropolitan area of San Antonio, TX. They are a family-owned and operated company, and have been doing this since 1947. Their motto (which they live up to) is “Happy Customers Since 1947”. Let the weight of that sink in for a moment. They are a small-to-medium sized business, with lots of employees, in a major metropolitan area, with lots of competition, and have been in continuous operation since 1947, and they really do have lots of happy customers. Consider how hard all of that is in today’s business climate! They pull it off daily, and I am about to tell you how (with their permission).
Lets talk about the culture they have set up at their business.
First and foremost, and at the center of ever decision they make is one simple philosophy. Personally, I love it, and I wish more businesses still adhered to this philosophy. Sadly, it is lacking in many businesses, and in a time when everything is internet-based, and you are lucky if you can even get a live person on the telephone. Have I got your attention? Want to hear their number one philosophy? Here it is, and I qoute “For over 70 years, our number one priority has been customer happiness. We believe if we can make our customers happy then the bottom line will be happy too.”
To them, this is not just a slogan. It’s their culture they have developed and they train into each and every employee. They do it right. If I didn’t tell you anything else, that would be enough to define their company, and how to develop programs, centered around their customers, which defines every decision the company makes. But I asked their permission to talk about their highly successful customer satisfaction survey process, and how they make that happen. So lets move forward. All of these are quotes from their company President, Mr. Randy Oliver. I will present them in bullet points.
- We do train and instill the importance of customer happiness (not just customer satisfaction) in our training. [Editorial: This is an important distinction]
- We publicly praise our employees every two weeks in a company meeting by sharing all of our happy customer comments with the group.
- We financially reward our employees for their happy customer comments from customers.
- If we get a survey card back where the customer gave our people all “A’s” then we’ll add $1.00 to their annual happy customer comment bonus.
- If we receive a survey card back where the happy customer wrote down some specific praise we add $5.00 to their annual happy customer comment bonus.
- If our employees invite a customer to leave an online review via Podium and the customer leaves a positive review the employee gets $10 that is paid monthly plus they get $5 added to their annual happy customer comment bonus.
- If I receive a happy customer voice mail then the employees involved in making the customer happy all get $5 added to their annual happy customer comment bonus.
- Our annual happy customer comment bonuses can sometimes add up to be $700 or more.
- We did start using Podium in November 2018 to collect more online reviews and we’ve gone from around 60 Google reviews to 242 reviews with a 4.9 rating. Some customers choose to leave a Facebook recommendation over the Google review.
- We send out a thank you letter along with our postage paid customer survey cards to homeowners and we still get a bunch of these back every week.
- In addition to all of the online reviews and postcard surveys I send you copies of we have 256 voice mails from happy customers and I play those during our company meetings when we get them.
- We’ll pretty-much do whatever it takes to try and make a customer happy including refunding the money they paid. We aren’t worried about having to make money on every single job but we are focused on making every single customer happy.
As you can see our happy customers aren’t by accident. It is the culture of our organization. We continually talk about it but more importantly we consistently demonstrate it.
To summarize, it truly IS about making every customer happy, from their first contact at their Customer Service person, to sales, to service, to technicians, top to bottom. Yes, there IS financial compensation to employees, but who is the ultimate winner? Of course, their customers. The trick is to do all of this without it being solely about the money, and truly making it about real customer service. You can’t completely “train” that into people. You must hire good employees that have a desire to provide good customer service in the first place. You must train them to do their jobs well and to execute well. Then there is the follow up. Another thing they do well is to leverage all that information. (That’s where I come in). It just doesn’t get collected and then sit in some folder somewhere. As was noted, public praise goes to the employees in front of their peers AND it is leveraged on their website and social media sites. It develops trust with existing and new potential clients.
This whole program is about implementation. Done poorly, this could be quite cheesy and appear to be like a bad marketing company plan. But done properly, with the right spirit, heart, integrity, leadership and management, it works precisely as it should, as a win-win for the customers, company and employees. It takes the entire team, pulling in the same direction, every day, with sincerity, to make this work. Mr Oliver and his crew at Hollywood Crawford Door Company, do it well, daily, and with great success.
You could, and should, think about a program, similar to this one, to jump-start your own business.
Allen Beck
AKOR Services
© (This article: Allen Beck and AKOR Services, 2019)
© (Randy Oliver and Hollywood Crawford Door Company, 2019)
