On 6 April we launched our latest publication The Scale Up Workbook: how to deliver customer service excellence. Part one of this blog series looked at what customer service means for the recruitment industry. Our second blog focused on the importance of collecting feedback to measure customer experience. For the final part of this series, we look at how to use that feedback to improve customer experience – and gain positive business results.
What should you do with feedback?
You’ve taken the first steps to improve customer experience by understanding what it means to your business, developing a plan and starting to collect feedback. So what’s next?
For your customers to see improvements in your service, you need to act on negative feedback. Craig Molloy from Energize Recruitment Solutions provides a practical example of how this can yield positive results. After discussing issues with a candidate who provided a satisfaction score of 1/10, Energize managed to place her. When they next asked her for feedback she gave a very high score and became a ‘promoter’ according to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) model. A promoter is a highly satisfied customer, who is likely to promote your company to friends or colleagues. Turning customers into promoters could win you more business.
The very action of following up with a client or candidate about their negative feedback will make them feel listened to and can improve their experience. It also allows you to understand where things have gone wrong, so you can improve your interaction with customers next time.
Who will manage this?
Improving your customer experience isn’t a one-off project – it’s an ongoing process that should be part of a long-term plan. Staff will need to put time into implementing changes, so making customer experience part of your management processes is key.
If you don’t currently have the resource, you should think seriously about investing in personnel who can support your improvements. Their role might involve training the rest of your employees to better their client interactions. They could play a part in adapting your company’s behaviour and culture to fit with customers’ needs. They could even help to improve employee engagement around providing customer service excellence. Ultimately this will lead to greater customer satisfaction and increased financial gain.
What should you do now?
Ensure that feedback is monitored and acted on within your organisation. Create a long-term strategy (one to five years) to monitor and revisit the customer experience plan, making sure it still works for your business and for your clients. Allocate resource for ongoing activity. This should include any activities to update your CRM systems, your website, or develop and implement training for staff. Invest in technology or improvements to customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Bear in mind that customer experience can always be improved. Keep striving for excellence.
The Scale Up Workbook: how to deliver customer service excellence is the second in the REC’s series of Scale Up publications for recruitment leaders seeking to grow their recruitment business. Each chapter has key questions and practical examples, and a final checklist provides guidance to help recruiters take steps to improve interactions with clients.
