Most carpet cleaners give out “Customer Comment Cards”. (If you don’t- you should!) These don’t need to be real fancy- just three or four questions with boxes to check on topics like: “Was your technician polite and helpful?” and “Were we careful with your furnishings?”
Be sure to leave a space for your customer to write in comments about the job and your techs.
Now obviously after all this trouble you want to actually have these comment cards returned so …
Always pre-apply an actual stamp to your Customer Comment Cards. Your clients won’t want to “waste the postage” and you’ll find your response rates will more than double!
Bonus TIP: Leave several spaces under the heading “Friends who might be interested in our services” for your client to write in names and phone numbers of prospective clients. Also ask: “May we use your name when contacting these people?”
For all of this to work your employees need to be both reminded (and rewarded) about giving great customer service. Here are some ideas to get your employees on board with Customer Comment Cards is what we’ll talk about in your next QuickTIPS!
Steve Toburen
Great points Steve!
No matter the business, comment cards are always useful when trying to gather feedback from your customers. As you also pointed out, it can benefit you and your company to leave a little bit of space on the comment cards for referrals. It is also important, like you mentioned, to place some form of return postage on each comment card since most people will be unwilling to pay for the postage themselves. I have seen a few comment cards in my time, and many of them left a lot to be desired to say the least. One company that I do know of though that creates some pretty awesome comment cards is SQM (http://goo.gl/x7hyc0). The best part is that they practically do all of the work for you once they have gathered all of the cards! It is simply a matter of choosing what to make of the data. If nothing is proactively done to address some of the issues found in the comments, then the whole process is virtually useless!
Cheers.