Checklist: Hire and Train Your Customer Service Staff

I found this article on inc.com about creating and improving a great customer service staff. There might be some good ideas to try this fall and take into next season. To view the article, click on the title. With in the article, there are subtitles that click to some more detail.

What do you think?

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I thought we would give it a shot for the Customer Survey discussion and see how it works for us. After that, we can either bag it or keep it for the future. Either way, it might be useful to see what all the hype is about.

What do you think?

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Customer Survey

A little while ago, the idea came up that it would be useful to survey our young plant customers to get a good feel for how we are doing, how they view us, and what we can do to meet their needs more effectively. (To read through this email more quickly, just skip the blue type.)

We can either send out survey cards or send out a survey email. Sending out an email survey has a number of advantages over the mail survey cards.

Email Survey Advantages:

• Much cheaper
• I can design something that looks professional and set it up for free. The service we can use would only be $20/month.
• To have a professional looking survey card, it would have to be designed and printed. Then we would have to address them all and add postage. I haven’t calculated the exact cost of this, but I know it would cost more than $20/month.
• To do a simple survey card just on regular paper, we still have to do postage, stuff envelopes, and include return postage.
• Easier to analyze results- the service we use can analyze and tally all the results in easy to understand information and graphs.
• The email survey is quick to fill out and easy to send back for our customers with email addresses. They wouldn’t have to send it back in the mail.

Email Survey Disadvantages

• As far as I can tell, the only disadvantage is that we don’t have all of our customer’s email address. From my understanding (and we have to check on the details of this). Even if we have only 5% of our customer’s email addresses, that would amount to about 100 customers. I think 75-100 is enough to get a decent survey of our customer’s opinions.

Another option is to do the survey by phone and make phone calls to our customers. They could ask the questions and then at the end, ask if the customer has an email address and would like to give it to us. They wouldn’t have to call all our customer’s, but maybe to add to the email survey.

Either way the survey is done, I think we should put some thought into the questions we ask our customers. I found a couple good articles giving advice for surveys that you might like to check out:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/print/0,2361,303673,00.html

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,319023,00.html

The articles are a bit long, so if you don’t feel like reading them, here are some highlights I thought would apply to us:

• Keep it short and focused- 10 questions is ideal, no more than 20
• Keep questions simple
• Use close ended questions were possible (multiple choice, rating, etc…)

That being said, lets throw in some ideas for things we would like to find out from our customers…