Runzheimer International is a business service provider of employee mobility solutions. Any time an employee needs to drive, travel, relocate or work remotely in the course of conducting business, we have a product or a service to help facilitate that outcome. We specialize in the processes, policies and payment solutions for companies to keep their workforce mobile.
We sell many intangible products, where the result of our service is a feeling. Therefore, it’s very important that we understand how our customers feel about the way our product works for them.
As expectations within the marketplace inevitably grow, we have become more disciplined about validating the factors that drive strong customer relationships. We know we have to perform at a higher level when it comes to our customer listening and learning methods.
After looking at best practices of other high performing companies, we identified some gaps in our approaches to how customers could provide us with feedback on their terms. We also learned we had too much variability in our methods of service recovery once an incident was identified. So the decision to move to a web-based survey environment that could provide the flexibility and responsiveness our customers expected seemed like a logical move. A careful and methodical review of the landscape drew us to QuestionPro.
We developed a series of customer satisfaction instruments that are tailored to the attributes of each of our product areas but share common questions. QuestionPro made it easy to do all the conditional branching we wanted to minimize the survey effort for our customers and only ask them questions we could act on. Links to those survey instruments are found on our web site and in the signature blocks of our emails. Now customers can give us feedback with just a couple of clicks anytime they choose to.
Making it easy to tell us how we are doing was a good step forward. However, the truly valuable aspect of this implementation was our integrated service recovery process. Each of our satisfaction survey instruments collects some data on a 5-point Likert scale (with 5 being highest and 1 lowest). We’ve set up QuestionPro Action Alerts that correspond to responses on that Likert scale, so if a customer has a dissatisfying experience and ranks us a 3 or less in any area, the survey response is sent to the appropriate customer support managers who immediately follows-up to see if we can correct their issue. Many customers we contact through this process are impressed that followed-up with them in the first place. Because of the action alerts, we are able to turn a dissatisfying experience into a positive experience for the majority of our customers by acting quickly on their feedback. In some cases, customers used the satisfaction survey again after being contacted to express their appreciation for our prompt attention to their concern.
While we are pleased with how our survey tools and integrated service recovery process perform, we have more work to do. This passive method of surveying tends to yield only the polarity of responses – those customers who are extremely happy or very dissatisfied. We don’t get enough feedback from routine customers who interact with us on a daily basis and have no motivation to provide unsolicited feedback. So “pushing” the survey out to more of them is what we’ll be doing next in order to continually improve our product and service performance. These investments in our listening and learning methods give us a competitive advantage in our marketplace. Companies become customers of Runzheimer International because we follow through on our promises of delivering accurate, fair and defensible mobility products backed-up by service and support that defines the performance standard in our industry. You can’t achieve that with “do it yourself” methods.
