How we improved client satisfaction without changing our services

The evolution of how we ask for feedback

Intro

I’ll admit something (now it’s been fixed). As the marketing manager, I would dread the section in our weekly team meeting where we cover the client feedback score. Not because it was bad, but because it never changed.

Clients say nice things about us all the time. This might be in conversation during a meeting or online, or in a ticket or email. But not via our an ‘official’ channel that gets recorded as data that we can use.

Why collect feedback?

It might seem like an obvious thing to do, but what does it get used for?

There are internal and external benefits of collecting feedback:

• It helps us improve our client experiences and services
• It helps us make business decisions
• We get an overall view of how satisfied our clients are
• It makes our clients feel valued so improves retention
• It is an unbias reflection we can showcase to potential clients of how well we treat existing ones
• It encourages a little healthy competition between departments to get the best client feedback

You may now understand my embarrassment when that client satisfaction number never moved. It’s so valuable to have an accurate and up-to-date number.

2019 — NPS and case studies

In 2019, I got greedy. I wanted a client satisfaction number and a case study and I wanted to collect that information all at once.

The way we collected this was to email clients with a link to a Google Form. We used a separate form for one-off project clients and another for ongoing work. Already, we’re getting convoluted.

This was a burden to potential respondents. I wanted to know:

• What products or services they were using
• If they were happy with our level of communication
• If they’d made a complaint since the last time we asked for (this question seems particularly silly, as we should already know and have resolved it).
• If they had any issues or anything nice to say
• If anyone in particular on the team had made an impact
• If they’d make any changes to anything
• If they could produce some kind of useful statistics to demonstrate money savings or efficiency increases
• Would they recommend us?

The problem is that I was asking the client to do my job for me, with no incentive. We do have some very lovely clients who religiously give feedback when asked. The issue with this is that it creates an inflated truth, where the same client keeps giving you a great score. Your score improves, but it’s based on multiples from one source. That’s no good for making genuine improvements to our business.

2020 — Cutting down the questions

We decided this was the wrong approach. We got rid of a lot of the questions but stuck with Google Forms.

An example email sent to clients asking them to go to a separate form to give feedback.

We were also using NPS (Net Promoter Score). This is a range from minus 100 to 100 which captures a client’s willingness to recommend us. It’s an indication of their satisfaction and loyalty.

We realised this wasn’t working either. It lacks the human side of knowing why a client might’ve given us that score. We had numbers, but they were meaningless.

We ditched the NPS score and began asking, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your experience with Code Enigma and its services?”. This was the only mandatory question on a form that had some optional ones for information that would be useful for marketing purposes.

Still, it was too much. The submissions weren’t coming in. Time for another re-think.

Now

Lead the horse to water and make it thirsty

If your user feels they’re clicking too much it means your user experience isn’t supporting their workflow efficiently. We redesigned the email and took out the unnecessary click that lead them to another page (which is off-putting).

We still ask the same question, but we ask them within the email itself.

Our re-designed feedback email with a star-rating

We replaced the button linked to the Google Form with clickable stars. We collect the submitted information via our website. Not only did this remove a click, but it’s visually more engaging.

We appreciate we’re asking for people’s time and opinion and they should be thanked for this. We added a prize draw incentive for providing feedback.

Three-pronged approach

Additionally to the email changes, we added the star rating to our ticketing system. It appears on support tickets went they are marked as closed (ie, when we’ve completed a task and should be asking how we did).

We also emphasised the importance of proactively asking for feedback to our project management team who have a more hands-on relationship with clients and can ask them directly. Specifically, we made it a part of our sprint retrospective meetings to seek a 5-star rating for the sprint.

(As for case studies, we realised these are an entirely separate matter and made improvements there, too. We prepare as much of the content as we can and ask very little of the client to reduce that burden).

Results

We use Metabase widely in the business. It is an open source business intelligence tool and it allows us to collate our feedback scores in once place.

Since adopting these changes, we’ve had more feedback in the past week than we have the past 6 months.