Within any organization that provides a product or service we often forget who’s opinion matters the most, the customers. Sales organizations are typically hyper focused on sales and growth which is great and should be a huge building block component. However, have you ever considered what your customers think post sale? Do you ever think about how they feel three, four or even five months post sale? Our customers can be our biggest advocates or our largest detractors and we don’t know what we don’t know.
With that being said it’s detrimental to any organization to not survey its customers and in some cases your target audience. As you all know, we’ve worked with a lot of independent agencies and, as such, we’ve seen and heard often that an agency will pride itself on its customer service. While I believe that most agencies do have superior customer service I like to see the proof and as an agency owner you should want to see it too!
The importance of doing a survey is paramount and there are a few ways to approach it. I’ve outlined a few scenarios for you to show how surveys can be approached.
- Pre-Sale Survey – Create a survey for your prospects and target market that you have emails for. Create questions for the prospect that asks them what they look for in an agency and what their expectation is when purchasing insurance. Find out exactly what makes them tick. You are going to have a smaller sample size when doing a survey like this so it helps to entice the prospect to fill it out by offering a $5 or $10 gift card. The responses you get will be valuable and it also will help with identifying prospects that have an active interest in working with your agency.
- Post Sale Survey – After someone has bought from you we typically do the happy dance and move on to the next one but a post sale survey immediately after someone has bought is when our political capital is the highest! While our sales team is typically graded on their production there should be a level of distinction to how well our sales process works. Knowing what the customer experience looks like from their point of view is extremely valuable information. It also allows you to set the expectation to the customer that you care about their point of view. They will appreciate it in the long run.
- Quarterly or Bi-Quarterly Survey – When it comes to our service staff it can be tricky when we want to set metrics to their performance. We are big believers that everyone in your organization should have metrics tied to their performance and with service staff it’s not always conclusive to grade them based solely on retention. We want to know from a customer how well we are doing after they’ve had time to experience our agency. It gives us critical information on how well we are doing and any opportunities for improvement. When someone asks us why we are the greatest at Customer Service we can actually back it up with data!
- Cancellation Survey – In my mind this is the most crucial survey you can do. When a customer leaves us we should know why. When I speak with owners on the source of their cancellation troubles they typically answer price. While I don’t disagree that customers will leave us because of price, in most case we find that customers leave us for at least three reasons. We won’t know what those other reasons are unless we ask. Find out from them in the survey what you could’ve done better to retain their business. Did they want a 6 month account review? Did they have a bad claims experience? Did they have a bad service experience? It’s difficult as an owner to be in the trenches each day and to be able to observe how our team performs so we need to see how we could have done things better.
Hopefully, this encourages you to look at your feedback loop and consider how you can improve upon it. Having worked with over 300 agencies we know how to help agencies survey their customer base. Give us a call today to learn more and develop a definitive survey strategy!
