There are many compelling and rather obvious reasons why you should survey your customers. For example, they help you to:

• Increase Satisfaction
• Enhance Loyalty
• Open Up Communication
• Recognize Successes and Opportunities
• Pinpoint Trends
• Identify Areas of Additional Leverage for Growth
• ...and many more!

But, today consumers are bombarded with surveys, and often times we can't hang up a call fast enough when the oh-so-pleasant automated recording says, "please stay on the line for our 2-minute survey..."  So how do we pull off creating an engaging survey that can result in those benefits listed above?  Zendesk has some great tips, which are here in an excerpt from one of their infographics (click on it to see the whole graphic and article):

When you shift focus from one task to another, that transition is neither fast nor smooth. Instead, there is a lag time during which your brain must yank itself from the initial task and then glom onto the new task. This shift, though it feels instantaneous, takes time. In fact, up to 40 percent more time than single tasking - especially for complex tasks.

-Jim Taylor, Ph.D, for psychologytoday.com

In the service industry, awareness is a must. You have to be fully aware and fully present to give the level of service that makes people take notice and want more.  Walt Disney ~ "Do what you do SO WELL that they will want to see it again and BRING THEIR FRIENDS." Chances are your customers are doing business with some of the world's finest service organizations, and because of that, your company's service experiences will be compared. So you need to ask yourself, how do we measure up in comparison?

Mistakes are to be expected, but knowing how to recover an angry or frustrated customer into a loyal customer is a learned art. A Customer Focused Attitude is critical for successful service recovery. Employees need to be trained to anticipate and identify potential problems, as well as have the experience to make decisions and to deliver skillful solutions to customer problems. 

All customer problems are opportunities to win over their loyalty. This weekend I was in a large home improvement store looking for a certain product. When I went to checkout, I asked the associate who was scanning my purchases if they carried this particular product. There were two additional associates standing around as I asked my question. Two of the associates told me what isle to look on to see "if" they had the product at all. I then asked if they could look in their system and verify whether or not the store carried this item. The same two associates quickly said no, they couldn't do that, and I would need to go look down the isle. The 3rd associate interrupted them both and said that she could check the system and let me know if they had the product. She left the register, took both of the associates with her, looked up the product and came back to me and told me they did not carry what I was looking for. She apologized and thanked me for waiting. I sure hope the two associates with her learned something about customer focused service. Attention and awareness can eliminate most issues. 

A LOT!  For those of you who don't know, K.I.S.S. stands for "Keep it simple, stupid" (not calling you stupid; just don't want you to act stupid).  According to Wikipedia, the meaning of K.I.S.S. is: "The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided."  Now applying this principle to customer service makes a lot of sense, right?  Businesses often neglect to uphold customer service standards since they don't want to put in the work required to train on and maintain them.  This is where businesses go wrong- implementing good, basic customer service practices is not hard, and for many people, it comes naturally once they are given a gentle nudge to embrace these skills. 

Great service organizations know how to read their customers and respond.  Businesses who lose site or misunderstand who their customers are and what they want, or what matters most to them, are at risk.  It's the little misses that really weigh on me. For example,my husband and I were recently at a well-known home improvement store purchasing bags of mulch, 22 to be exact, and some plants.  As my husband was paying for our purchases, he asked if someone could load the mulch in our car.  The cashier said she would call for someone while my husband went and pulled the car around. As I was leaving, I didn't see the large rolls of plastic to line the back of our car, so I asked the cashier about it.  She scrambled around looking and finally told me that I would need to go to the front of the store to get the plastic.  I think we all know that the distance between lawn and garden and the front of the store isn't exactly close.  At this point, the car had been pulled up for the "someone" to load our car.  "Someone" casually strolled over to our car as I finished loading the last 3 bags of mulch into the car.  Big service misses here, don't you think?