Are you measuring customer satisfaction? Do you ask your customers (external or internal customers) to rate you on a satisfaction survey index? If you do, then how you react to customer interactions before the survey could define feedback your customers give you, or not give you for that matter.
If you rely only on customer satisfaction survey scores, you might be missing out valuable feedback that customers never give you in the surveys. You get feedback at all times from customers, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect. How you react to it defines how customers perceive your service as. If you don't listen to your customers during regular interactions, they are less likely to give you any feedback in customer surveys. They are more likely to stop giving you feedback. Worst, they will tell others about the bad service instead of telling you about it.
I am sure we work very hard to exceed customer expectations. But let's face is, as service providers (internal or external), sometimes we do get irritated at customers. We believe so much in our own service levels that we forget to see if these are still relevant for the customers. How we react to the inputs when a customer does give us some feedback changes the way we will receive feedback in the future. Sometimes inadvertently while responding to a customer feedback, we may put them off by disbelieving their feedback by telling them the unlikeliness of a service failure because of robust processes and systems. Instead of lauding internal processes, all that is really needed is to acknowledge the experience customer might have had.
So when you receive any feedback from your customers, first respond with a simple acknowledgement and apology of the experience. This is usually enough to turn the customer around. Later when you review the situation and identify the cause of customer experience, you can get back the customer with more details. This could even include things where the customer may have been at fault and things that you want the customer to change.
I recently was responding to journalist questions about the elearning industry. While most answers could be found in innumerable industry reports, there were two that caught my attention. I would be interested in hearing more about these.
Do you see demand for e-learning from any particular sectors in the economy?
As a vendor organization, we have seen elearning clients grow in almost all sectors. Technology has been an all time favorite and demand for technology training has been consistent across the years. Other sectors are banking and finance, retail, engineering, and education, not in any particular order. In terms of areas of training, sales training, compliance training, application training, new hire training, and online education stand out more amongst a plethora of training areas.
What I am interested in hearing about is whether there are any particular sectors or areas in which elearning is growing faster than others? Any sectors/areas that are experiencing a slowdown? Is there a report that highlights sector/area wise trends in elearning? What are you seeing as trends?
Are companies happy with the quality of e-learning contractors?
Now this one was quite interesting. What are you experiencing, as a customer and as a vendor organization?
As a customer, are you generally happy with the services provided by independent contractors and vendor organizations? What qualities do you like to see in your vendor? What kind of vendor provides you with the service levels that you find satisfactory? What are the common mistakes and pitfalls for vendors when they work with you? What do you think vendors should do to make outsourcing successful for you?
As a vendor, what are you experiencing? What are customers looking for? Are they hard to please or are you able to satisfy them with ease? What are the common mistakes and pitfalls for customers when they work with you? What do you think customers should do to make outsourcing successful?
It would be interesting to see responses.
