How Customer Feedback Fuels Growth at SingleOps
Finding out what your customers think could be the most effective way to grow and improve your business. Without feedback from customers, owners are blind to how their services and processes are received. 67% of customers cite bad experiences as the main reason to not return.[1] Since acquiring a new customer can cost [2]six times as much as retaining an existing one, capturing valuable insights is vital to offering value for your clients and staying competitive in your local market.
Know Your Target, Find the Arrows
Customer feedback not only helps drive loyalty, but also provides insight into what customers value most. This can spark improvements to your process or services in areas that you didn’t even realize are most important to your clients. For example, if you survey 100 clients and learn that they value a paperless process over lower prices during a pandemic, this might encourage investment in a great digital tool (such as SingleOps!) over cutting operational costs to keep prices low.
While there are many ways of collecting feedback, not all are suited for every business. Before creating a survey or email campaign, it’s important to ask first: what actionable information do you hope to gain from this feedback? Maybe it’s learning why repeat customers come back so you can use that information in marketing campaigns to attract one-time customers to stick with you, or maybe it’s identifying a local trend in landscaping services so you can invest in the right tools for next season. Whatever the reason, make sure you pinpoint it and assign a specific goal, and create a plan of action.
Customer Feedback Channels at SingleOps
Here at SingleOps, we use a variety of tools to measure our customers’ satisfaction. Ongoing feedback is collected from customers through our Feedback Portal, and internally through a Product Request channel. These ongoing efforts provide valuable insight into how our customers would like to see SingleOps improved through additional features and functionality. While these channels serve as a great ongoing gauge of product fit, they only tell part of the story. We don’t only want to know what users think of our product, but the customer service offered by our implementation, support, and customer success teams as well. In short, we want to gauge how satisfied our customers are with all facets of their experience with SingleOps.
Here is an example of a Customer Feedback Portal Request which was submitted by a SingleOps customer, “Upvoted” by other customers, then prioritized and completed by our product and development team. Once a feature is released, it’s marked Completed by our Product Manager, Luke.
During implementation, we conduct brief weekly “pulse” surveys to find out how the learning process is progressing. This ongoing feedback helps our implementation team improve their training for customers on a case by case basis, and customize each implementation to improve success for new customers using SingleOps. When graduating from implementation, a final survey is conducted to collect feedback on the entire implementation experience. Then, live clients are surveyed once per quarter – often enough to capture valuable information on how we are doing, but not so frequent that it becomes a burden to our customers. For this ongoing pulse check, we use a survey method called Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Net Promoter Score – Our North Star for Customer Satisfaction
We conduct our Net Promoter Score in two places – within the SingleOps app and through email. Our goals as a company are 1) to gather accurate and useful feedback from as many users as possible, and 2) to have as many survey respondents as possible rate us a 9 or 10 (which are considered promoters). The reason we value 9s and 10s is that we believe most people would only refer a product or service to a friend if they were truly impressed by it, and we want every customer to feel that way about SingleOps.
So what happens to all of this information – thoughtfully written feature requests from customers, NPS data, requests made during a phone call with support and submitted through our internal channels? We use this valuable information in the future planning of the product, training resources, and even hiring within our organization.
Turning Customer Feedback into Action Items
Each quarter, a plan is laid out by our product and development team which includes the prioritized goals for the quarter in the form of new features or improvements. Decisions on which parts of the program to focus on are impacted substantially by what we’re hearing from customers. Recent examples of product roadmap plans impacted by customer feedback include On Demand jobs for those who can’t schedule work at the time jobs are created, additional date filter types on the popular Jobs and Visits Reports, and accessing Crew Notes directly from the My Day page. For more examples of recent changes to SingleOps, please visit the Release Notes section of our website.
Throughout the quarter, we use ongoing feedback to make sure our priorities are in line with our customers, and remain agile so that we can pivot to urgent product changes, if necessary. To further segment the plan and stay on track, our developers conduct bi-weekly sprint demos for the team. This is a wonderful opportunity to demo new features being released soon, and present incremental progress on larger product changes.
Over the past few years, SingleOps has grown substantially, thanks to our amazing customers and dedicated team members. Our success is driven by customer referrals and word of mouth recommendations, provided by satisfied customers who are willing to partner with us and engage with prospective customers. These referrals are the final method of receiving feedback, and we are so grateful for the time committed by our customers to champion SingleOps in the green industry.