It’s not a personality thing. You don’t have to swap family photos and go for dinner once a month. It’s important that your customers feel welcome in your service department, though, and that professional courtesy and approachability can set you apart.
The barometer for your service department’s friendliness and professionalism is almost certainly your CSI survey score, right? It’s what you use to gauge what your customers truly think about your service department. After all, your customers answer the survey honestly, don’t they?
Not so. Virtually anyone who has completed a customer satisfaction survey, whether for a restaurant, an online help chat, a spa, or a car dealership knows those responses are closely tied to someone’s personal income. No one wants to be responsible for someone taking home less of a paycheck because of a bad experience, so most people will complete the survey with full marks.
The degree of dissatisfaction can influence the survey, however. If you’ve received straight zeros or ones across the whole survey from someone, you can safely assume that customer is unhappy. Even when the service visit went swimmingly aside from one aspect, some customers will destroy you on the whole survey when just one question should really take the hit.
There are three kinds of survey respondents:
- The trained customer. This is the repeat customer that you’ve trained to provide the responses you want – all perfect scores. They know their survey answers have an effect on someone’s income and don’t want to rock the boat. They may have had a less than stellar experience, but you might never hear about it because they’ve been trained (by you) not to mention it.
- The disruptor. This is the customer that comes in with a chip on their shoulder or with something to prove. Even perfect service results in less than perfect scores simply because “there’s always some way to improve”. You’ll never fully satisfy this critic and their scores will reflect it.
- The honest respondent. Making up a tiny portion of your survey results, the person who answers honestly about their service visit will have answers typically ranging from neutral to perfect. You might see a “dissatisfied” answer now and then, but largely the answers will stay close to the positive side.
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