Pro Tips: Use a Report Card to Improve Customer Service

To really know if your customers are satisfied, you need some type of feedback mechanism, says Kevin Nolan of Nolan Painting. Here’s one of the best methods he’s found.

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Video Transcription:

Kevin Nolan:

In order to be able to really understand if your customers are happy or not, you have to have some type of feedback mechanisms.

We train our folks to, at the end of the job, to approach the customer and say: “Here’s a feedback report – a report card – and we’d like to get all As. Hopefully we did everything it took to get straight As with you. If there’s anything that doesn’t warrant an A, could you please let me know? I’d like to address it.”

And then we hand it to the client, and the client can either fill it out right in front of the employee and hand it back it back to them and they would bring it in. Or the client can fold it up in the self-addressed, stamped envelope that we provide and mail it back to us.

Of course, we also have online versions and email versions of the same report card, but we find that the paper version has the best results. We’ve been able to, over the years, maintain about a 70 percent response rate from our clients.

One of the reasons why we have such a high rate is that we bonus our crew leaders on their response rate, not on their scores.

I would rather get a report card back that was bad, than not get a report card back at all. Because if you don’t get a report card back with information, how could you get better?

So, we’re looking to get better, and we’re looking for that feedback, and if we made mistakes, then we’d like to be able to correct it.