Corporate customer love…

I recently read the book Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh – CEO of Zappos.com. He believes much of the success of his $1billion online retail business comes from its commitment to the culture of the business – which allows every person in the business to stay customer focussed.

He talks about customer happiness with religious zeal. The culture of the business means that there is not a department accountable for customer care – the whole company is. Every employee has at least two weeks on the phone with customers as part of their induction training. No matter what role they have joined the business for, being with customers if everyone’s job.

At some point in the book – Hsieh poses the question – ‘As leaders are we asking the right questions?’ I ask myself – how do we know what are the right questions?

Recently RedBalloon for Corporate wanted to find out not just if RedBalloon was delivering on it’s promise (ie. customer satisfaction), we wanted to gain real insights to assist us ask the ‘right questions’ and determine future activities.

We know to be successful we must be truly transparent with our customers – acknowledge our commitment to customers – but also appreciate that sometimes things do go awry.

If we are not asking the right questions – and listening to customers – more often than not, we also won’t even know if things get out of kilter. Establishing listening posts with customers is also a great source of innovation and development of how we can grow and better support our corporate clients.

We found that 94% of the corporate customers said that we were friendly, knowledgeable and professional. But that raises some questions. While no one said we were extremely bad at these things what is it that the 6% of people who are ‘on the fence were expecting? How could we either better manage expectations or create a better approach for them? RedBalloon has close to 2,000 corporate customers so a short fall of 6% represents 120 people, which is a lot of clients who we are not serving the way they want us to.

Ninety-four per cent of of people also rated the experience suppliers approach in the same way. This gives us an opportunity to drill down more into what people expected and how we could make that smoother for them.

Satisfaction is a subjective term – and depends on an individual’s perceptions… so what we wanted to discover was whether our customers talked about us to others and are advocates of what we do… I was delighted to see that 92% have recommended us to others… which of course supports the theory that word-of-mouth is the best marketing strategy of all.

As RedBalloon progresses its customer excellence program, this is the first time we have surveyed our corporate customers. Thank you so much to the hundreds of people who took the time to help us listen.

We appreciate it – and look forward to delivering.

Naomi Simson is considered one of Australia’s ‘Best Bosses’. She is an employee engagement advocate and practices what she preaches in her own business. RedBalloon has been named as one of only six Hewitt Best Employers in Australia and New Zealand for 2009 and awarded an engagement scorecard of over 90% two years in a row – the average in Australian businesses is 55%. RedBalloon has also been nominated by BRW as being in the top 10 Best Places to Work in Australia behind the likes of Google. One of Australia’s outstanding female entrepreneurs, Naomi regularly entertains as a passionate speaker inspiring people on employer branding, engagement and reward and recognition. Naomi writes a blogand is a published author – and has received many accolades and awards for the business she founded – RedBalloon.com.au.