HireMyVA Podcast

HireMyVA Podcast 153- How to Do a Customer Satisfaction Survey

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Episode Summary

Doing customer, or client, surveys is critical for your business as it’s a great way to know if you’re hitting the mark with your clients and how you can improve from THEIR perspective.

We’ve already talked about how to do AARs, which is how you can improve things from YOUR perspective, and that’s in episode 98, “After Action Review How To’s”

You really can’t go too wrong in what you ask of folks, here are some do’s and don’ts. Wait, they are do’s, we like to be positive!

- DO make it part of your regular process.
- DO look at the feedback and take action.
- DO ask, for the good ones, if you can use it as a testimonial.
- DO it at multiple stages in your interactions. Discuss example on how we do this for our White Glove Service.
- DO thank them afterwards.
- DO give them a heads up at the beginning of client interaction that you’ll be doing this and WHY!
- DO keep it simple.
- DO ask them more than once to respond.
- DO preface it by stating the entire reason you’re doing this is to help you better serve others, and to NOT hold back on your thoughts.
- DO consider giving rewards for feedback, like gift cards.

RESOURCES
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Episode to look back on:
Episode 98: After Action Review How Tos - https://youtu.be/NywaZwBACF0

Looking for bite-size nuggets of learning for leaders and high-achievers? Go to
https://yoogozi.com/

Learn more about our course and community, and our White Glove Service:
https://hiremyva.com

Need a website you can be proud of? Let us help you.
https://prowebsitecreators.com

Looking for a business mentor that will surely propel you to success? Check out Larry's site.
https://larrybroughton.me

Learn more about Larry Broughton
========================
Website: https://larrybroughton.me
Instagram: https://bit.ly/3vXPEoT
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3pIXjq8
Facebook: https://bit.ly/3pKVxEU

Learn more about Dave Braun
========================
Website: https://prowebsitecreators.com/about
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3EpvoQe

#HireMyVA
#VirtualAssistant
#CustomerSatisfactionSurvey

Episode Transcription

Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hello, folks. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building podcast, brought to you by Yoogozi.com and Victory. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with Virtual Assistants without breaking the bank. And of course, that means your bank. I’m Dave Braun, I’m here with my partner, a fantastic business mentor, and coach. But you know, what’s most important is my good friend, Larry Broughton.

Larry Broughton
00:00:27
Hello, handsome David.

Dave Braun
00:00:29
How are you doing, Larry?

Larry Broughton
00:00:30
I’m well, thank you very much. Crazy week.

Dave Braun
00:00:34
There are always crazy.

Larry Broughton
00:00:36
Well, how many times have I seen you already in the last couple of days? It’s been—We’ve got a lot going on.

Dave Braun
00:00:40
Yeah, we do. Didn’t we just have our Virtual spotlight session today?

Larry Broughton
00:00:46
Earlier today.

Dave Braun
00:00:47
We did. And it was really good. It actually brought up, some stuff that is so important for our people when they’re, doing what we’re gonna talk about today plus going to a conference or convention. I think we gotta record a new episode on that. That should be upcoming. But that was really powerful. And then we had somebody just talk off the cuff. It’s like, Hey, here’s what’s going on in my business. And we had some really, really good advice. It was a lot of fun.

Larry Broughton
00:01:16
Those Virtual spotlight sessions where we get to take a half hour or whatever it is and go deep into someone’s challenge, opportunity, or idea are hugely valuable. I mean, how often do you get to do that with someone? As business owners, oftentimes we just think that we’ve gotta do this all by ourselves because the truth is most people don’t have formal mentors in their life. And so this is a confidential space where people can come and share opportunities, challenges, and ideas, challenges, opportunities, ideas. It’s pretty powerful.

Dave Braun
00:01:50
Yeah. And one of the things that made me feel so good about this last one was one of the members, because we go over the previous session with everybody and what happened, and one of the members said, well, I did this and this and this. And it was all based on what we talked about. And it was almost like in this person’s relationship with a client, it became what? Bunnies, rainbows and, you know—

Larry Broughton
00:02:17
Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows?

Dave Braun
00:02:18
Rainbows and ice cream and cake frosting and all that stuff.

Larry Broughton
00:02:23
Well, you know, I don’t usually know these topics going into these calls, but I do know what the topic is today, and it pertains to this, and it has to do with, dealing with clients and customer dissatisfaction stuff. So I’ll let you do this real setup for this, but we did ask him, Okay, now that you’ve dealt with that because that was a big challenge a month ago when we spoke to him of this, I’ll tell you they did an exchange of services and products for money. And although the client agreed to the whole process after a couple of weeks, he was just not satisfied, not happy. And so we encouraged him to do some things we’ll probably talk to talk about today, but that was, go face the client.

Dave Braun
00:03:08
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:03:08
Do this, this, and this. And he said the relationship’s never been better now. That’s always a good thing because unfortunately, David it seems like, particularly in today’s business environment, it seems like we’ve got into us against them— relationship with our clients because most businesses are running short-staffed, team members are stressed out, prices are up, supply chain problems are preventing you from doing your job as quickly and as efficiently as before. There are a lot of opportunities to miss the price value perception that a client or potential client might have.

Dave Braun
00:03:46
Yes.

Larry Broughton
00:03:49
So if you just say—I’m not a big believer that the client is always right.

Dave Braun
00:03:56
Oh, that’s absolutely true. They’re not always right. But like one thing you talk about—

Larry Broughton
00:03:59
If we define what the expectations are on both sides and just admit, Hey, we, we missed the mark. I’m sorry we didn’t meet your expectations. And you know, even if it’s a bad relationship and you’re never gonna do business with each other again. You can protect your reputation by offering some suggestions to the client and come to go politely, go pound sand someplace else.

Dave Braun
00:04:24
Yeah. You can, I know I’ve got an interaction with a client, they want me to do something on the website, and I’m like, No, that’s not the place to do it on this page. You need to do it over in your calendaring system and here are the reasons why.

Larry Broughton
00:04:41
Did you say it like that to them? Or did you soften it up?

Dave Braun
00:04:43
Oh, I soften I soften them up a little bit.

Larry Broughton
00:04:48
Yeah. Well, you can be firm and respectful at the same time.

Dave Braun
00:04:51
Yeah. And absolutely. Because, you know, as business owners, really, we’ve gotta make sure we have our best client’s interests at heart, and we gotta sometimes have those tough conversations with them and say, No, this is not in the best interest long term for how we wanna do stuff.

Larry Broughton
00:05:06
And we got to remember, Dave, is that they’ve hired us for a reason. We should be more of an expert with our products and services than they are.

speaker 0
00:05:15
Yes.

Larry Broughton
00:05:16
Now, we need to serve them for sure. But if we are serving them and giving them an inferior product because they simply don’t know then it’s our responsibility to bring them up to speed on why this approach or this product will better serve them long term.

Dave Braun
00:05:32
Right.

Larry Broughton
00:05:35
So, you know, there’s that impossibility triangle that we’ve, we’ve talked about and talked and taught on before. We can deliver a product or service with high quality. It can be, you can choose quality, speed, or price. You can’t provide all three of those. Pick two.

Dave Braun
00:05:56
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:05:57
You want it fast. All right. Well, you can pick fa if you want it really fast, you’re gonna have to compromise on either quality or expense. Or pick anyone. So we need to talk more about that, I think. And I think there’s an article on Yoogozi.com on the impossibility triangle if I remember correctly.

speaker 0
00:06:19
All right. Future episode.

Larry Broughton
00:06:21
There you go.

Dave Braun
00:06:24
Should we get to our topic?

Larry Broughton
00:06:25
Let’s get into the topic. We’ve already did a long enough preamble and you probably already figured out what we’re gonna be talking about today, folks, so…

Dave Braun
00:06:31
Well, you know, this is our podcast and we can do what we want.

Larry Broughton
00:06:37
But let’s set it up formally.

Dave Braun
00:06:39
All right. So here is, this is actually number 153. Wow. We’re getting up there. So the question is, how do I do a customer satisfaction survey?

Larry Broughton
00:06:50
You know, when you first brought this to my attention, it reminded me, Dave, that a couple of years ago, maybe before the pandemic, probably three or four years ago now, was at MSNBC and did a segment with JJ Ramberg on this topic.

Larry Broughton
00:07:06
Because as it turns out, if you were, and fewer businesses are actually asking their clients, asking their customers, Hey, how did we do? Did we meet your expectations? Did we exceed your expectations? And so what happens is, you only hear from the very best and very worst

Larry Broughton
00:07:26
You know, of your clients. And generally, they don’t even tell you, they tell some online forum. So you don’t hear from the middle mass of your client base. Right. And as you know, we, our human tendencies to go towards the negative, those negative responses reviews spread like wildfire. And so what I had suggested, and maybe what we ought to do was just take a second and watch that video, and then we can kind of come back. That might be a good setup for the rest of the podcast. You wanna do that?

Dave Braun
00:08:01
Yeah, let’s do that. So, okay folks, we’re gonna put a video in here and watch it all the way through and then we’ll come back.

Larry Broughton
00:08:10
Absolutely. I think any organization needs to, whether you’re in a restaurant, a hotel, or a manufacturing organization, we all have customers or clients. And so, yes, I think that what we need to do is get to the consumer, the complainer, the whiner before they get to the internet and start reviewing you. So yeah, anytime you do a transaction, there is an opportunity to ask for feedback.

Dave Braun
00:08:32
Got it. And be clear that we want your honest feedback Absolutely. And respond to the people who have something that makes sense that you did wrong.

Larry Broughton
00:08:39
Sure. And also, I think we need to create an environment in our own organization for our team members to be actively seeking feedback. Too often in organizations, I’m staying at a hotel right now here in town, and it’s not a great environment. And when I offer feedback to them, you can see

Larry Broughton
00:08:55
them shrinking, like, Oh my gosh, they’re gonna get beat up because I’m gonna have to share this bad news with someone. If we create an environment, we say, No, we want this information because we’re gonna improve by it. That’s a win-win.

Dave Braun
00:09:06
Okay.

Dave Braun
00:09:07
Well, that was awesome. And Larry, I love the video.

Larry Broughton
00:09:10
Well, there you have it. Right? So it’s very difficult, so I’m a hotel guy. I was staying at a hotel there, and one of the interesting things that I found that I’m maybe just spending a little bit more time on right now is that we really do need to build cultures in our organizations where we seek information from our clients. Because at that hotel, I was like I did not approach the guest service host or the front office manager with any kind of anger or frustration. In fact, I pulled them off to the side and said, Listen, I’m in the hotel industry, kind of, I get how this stuff kind of happens, but they were the whitest ghost, they were like very nervous. And I could say, Maybe you ought to share this. And she’s like, I don’t know about that. You know, about sharing this with her general manager. And you could tell that there was not a culture where that kind of feedback was accepted or embraced. When we ask our clients and our customers for real honest feedback, you better have the courage to accept it.

Dave Braun
01:10:25
Yeah. And to act on it.

Larry Broughton
01:10:26
Because the truth hurts sometimes. And you’re absolutely right. Then you have to act on it. As leaders, Dave, I think when we encourage our team members to understand that they’re not gonna lose their jobs because I mean, the example I always use— unless you have a team member who punches a client. If it’s just like, Hey, we fell short in this area and we’re gonna fix it, they’re not gonna lose their job. That you use this as a tool to improve. That’s why you’re gonna solicit feedback. We’re asking for this information because we wanna be better at what we do. We wanna serve you better in the future. When you look at it from that perspective, it’s a tool for improvement. Because the truth is, particularly as your business grows and expands, you bring new products and service offerings to your, to your clients, there is no way in God’s green earth that you are going to be able to monitor every aspect of the process.

Larry Broughton
01:11:30
You just can’t. And so by soliciting feedback from, from your clients, you can give the truth of what’s the delivery actually like for reals, Not in theory, not we think it’s gonna happen this way— for real. And so I would just encourage you to change our mindset about these customer client satisfaction surveys and use them as tools for improvement. The great thing is these are both leading and lagging indicators. I think we spoke about this, we did in a previous podcast, right? There are a lagging indicator and it tells you, Hey, here’s what’s happened in the past. We keep falling short with our supply chain, or we don’t have enough inventory to serve people. Or we’ve got these team members at this time of day who just don’t seem to be, have this Jodi Vive and their spirit, you know, their spirit to serve and be happy.

Larry Broughton
01:12:22
So that’s the lagging indicator. There’s not a lot you can do about that except to go back and coach and try to fix the problems. The leading indicator is this, if people are posting these things online, it’s going to tell you that if you keep having those problems, then your business is gonna drop, You’re gonna lose market share on it. But if you’ve got, if your guest client, and customer surveys are saying great things, you’re likely to gain market share if your competitors aren’t keeping up with you. So it’s one of those rare KPIs that are both leading and lagging. And we need more of those, by the way.

Dave Braun
01:12:58
Yeah. That’s a, So it’s great. We’ve got to be doing surveys. We’ve got to be—

Larry Broughton
01:13:03
It’s a non-negotiable. You have to. Dave, we’ve had clients in the past, you said, But I can’t survey, there’s no way that I can survey my, you know, for whatever reason. If you do a transaction, if you take money from someone, there’s an opportunity right there to give them a survey of some sort. It can be a one-question survey, or it can be more in-depth. If they’re giving you information, there’s an opportunity, whether it’s a QR code at your point of sale place, whether it’s online, whether it’s once they’ve hit the send button or the purchase button online, there’s an opportunity to send an email, give a survey, give ’em a physical one. Even if it’s a manufacturing facility, it might be a B to B transaction. There is no excuse on why we’re not surveying our clients.

Dave Braun
01:14:00
Yeah. You went into some great dos. I mean, we’ve got dos and I gotta be careful I say that because if I say do twice in a row, it sounds like do, do.

Dave Braun
01:14:10
(Laughs)

Dave Braun
01:14:12
So these are the things you’re supposed—these dos you’re supposed to do, not —

Larry Broughton
01:14:18
Do, do these.

Dave Braun
01:14:21
Yeah. And now one of the things I think it’s important is, you can actually put in the AAR process along with all of this after-action review. We talked about how to do that in episode 98. And I think that concentrates a lot on doing and improving things from, you know, internally and from your perspective. How do you do a customer survey or a client survey to where you can actually feed that into your AAR process? Right? So—

Larry Broughton
01:14:53
Let something really quickly. Words have meaning, right? The person that we were talking about earlier today was a one-time customer for our coaching client earlier today. So a customer is transactional, the way I describe it, it’s not technically the case, but clients are relational in my book. What’s that mean? They do more than one transaction with you. I had the guy that was on the call this morning not gone and actually faced this client who was upset, and dissatisfied with the installation of this product and service and is both product and the service. In this case, it would’ve been a customer. But now that the relationship is rebuilt and as he said, better than ever, now this is a potential client where they’ll come back and make another purchase from you. And let’s see, the reminder for everybody, one of the most expensive parts of running your business is the client acquisition part. Why wouldn’t you try to maintain, build, and grow this relationship with somebody who you’ve already spent, God knows how many dollars, attracting to make that first purchase from you?

Dave Braun
01:16:05
Yeah. We’re gonna—

Larry Broughton
01:16:06
The problem is its ego or its pride, or fear.

Dave Braun
01:16:11
Yeah. And our q and a coming up here in a few days, we’re gonna talk about like the sales pipeline, sales funnel, right? And one of the key components of that and this whole process is repeat sales to current clients. And you gotta treat ’em like clients if you want repeat sales. Because it is very expensive and it takes a lot of time to get somebody through that funnel. You’ve already established the love, know and trust factor or you know, and all that ahead of time.

Larry Broughton
01:16:44
So we’re gonna go do-dos.

Dave Braun
01:16:47
Here are some do-dos.

Larry Broughton
01:16:49
Okay. What are the do-dos, Dave?

Dave Braun
01:16:51
Okay, well one of the first ones is, make it part of your regular process. In other words, process this thing, make it so it happens automatically as much as possible in every single client interaction.

Larry Broughton
01:17:04
Like systematize it you mean, part of the DNA.

Dave Braun
01:17:07
Yeah. Put it into your checklist at the end of a project so that you actually have to check it off. Do something like that. If you’re gonna do it manually, do it to where it automatically happens when you close a client ticket in your help ticket system. That’s what we do. But make it part of your regular process because otherwise, you are gonna forget and there you’re gonna be missing as you talk about Larry, that leading indicator you’re gonna miss be missing out on that.

Larry Broughton
01:17:33
Yeah.

Dave Braun
01:17:34
So I think that’s one of the big keys. That’s one of the first do-dos to do.

Larry Broughton
01:17:43
Yeah. What else have you got?

Dave Braun
01:17:45
Well, and I think we talked about this earlier though, is like, look at the feedback and take action on it.

Larry Broughton
01:17:51
The worst thing you can do is not take action. You ask for feedback and they tell you, and then you do nothing with it. You wanna burn credibility. That’s a quick way to do it.

Dave Braun
01:18:00
Well, here’s one of the things is people may be listening to this and thinking, Oh, I don’t wanna give, deal with that negative feedback and feedback to my team. But you’re gonna get a lot of positive feedback and if you’re in business, you’re probably doing a lot of good stuff. Right? So you’re gonna get positive feedback. That’s just as important as feedback to your team.

Larry Broughton
01:18:18
Yes, yes. I’ve forgotten even about that. In our hotel business, we oftentimes put in small incentives that those folks who are mentioned by name in, in reviews, positively mentioned by name, get small cash bonuses. This might be five bucks, you know?

Dave Braun
01:18:46
Yeah. It’s, it’s not the amount oftentimes it’s—

Larry Broughton
01:18:49
It’s just recognition.

Dave Braun
01:18:50
A recognition. The gesture. That’s important.

Larry Broughton
01:18:55
Yeah.

speaker 0
01:18:56
So what do you think about, what’s another two?

Larry Broughton
01:18:58
Well, I think we get so wrapped up like I just did about the negative ones is to ask for, Hey, tell me about a good experience you might’ve had. Particularly if it is someone who’s giving you a negative one, say, Okay, that’s awesome. And once you’ve got that resolved, it’s like, is there anyone on the team that we should be recognizing who did something good for us, you know, something positive for us? So I think really being specific in asking for good ones. So it’s good when you can turn them into testimonials, they can end up on your website or wherever you do your marketing stuff. So I would encourage folks to be asking for those. By the way, you and I were talking earlier today on our call, Virtual spotlight call. It’s something that we’ve been doing for years in my organization is where prior to the pandemic, I was calling at least five guests per week. Just out of the blue, just calling him outta the blue, Hey, I saw that you’d stayed at (you name the hotel). Hey, I’m Larry, I’m CEO of Broughton Hotels, saw you stayed at our hotels. I’m just checking in with you. How did it go…

Larry Broughton
02:20:08
…for you and just zip it and listen and ask more questions. And times they would be blown away. I mean, when’s the last time the CEO or business owner of a business you did some kind of, had some kind of transaction with, called you unsolicited just to check in? Wanna start some positive word of mouth. You do that kind of stuff, right?

Larry Broughton
02:20:36
And so I’ve been in the habit of doing that for a long time. And so I was pretty fearless about it. But I’d like to hear from you, Dave, cuz you kind of mentioned this morning, you started calling clients recently. Tell me about that. Maybe share that here a little bit.

Dave Braun
02:20:52
Yeah, so I should talk about that in detail maybe in another episode about how I came up with a system.

Larry Broughton
02:20:59
Of course.

Dave Braun
02:21:01
But yeah, last week I called a client. I hadn’t talked to like on the phone, I hadn’t talked to them. Probably Larry, this is gonna shock you. I would say at least before the pandemic. So it’s really been like three years. We’ve exchanged emails and stuff as needed. But you know, like three years. And I called him and I said just to kind of say hi. And a couple things that he said to me was really interesting. One is like, well, you’re doing a really good thing is calling your customers. That’s very good. You should be doing that. And then he said, You know, I’ve heard about this other program, this HireMyVA thing that you’re doing. Tell me more about that. And I told him, the next thing I said is, Well, yeah, I’d be happy to tell you about it, but I didn’t make this call to sell you anything new. And he is like, Oh, I understand. I asked, I wanna hear about it.

Larry Broughton
02:21:57
That’s a revenue-generating opportunity right there.

Dave Braun
02:22:00
So Yeah. So you didn’t even—

Larry Broughton
02:22:02
Expect.

Dave Braun
02:22:02
Yeah, I didn’t even expect it, and it just showed me that when if we don’t talk to our clients, we are doing a disservice to them. Cause we don’t know, we can’t figure out the goods and the bads. We can’t figure out where they’re struggling and where we can possibly help. Even if it’s not us helping them directly, we can always refer them to somebody else that can help ’em with their problems. Because every entrepreneur at every time in their business has got something that’s on their mind that they need help with.

Larry Broughton
02:22:30
Yeah, yeah.

Dave Braun
02:22:31
Or they’re struggling with.

Larry Broughton
02:22:34
I encourage folks also to do these surveys during multiple stages of the process here, depending on, if I own a convenience store, for instance, that’s difficult to do. You’ve got the product, they walk in, they grab their stuff and they’re on the way out. You could have a suggestion box there. You could have a, there are ways to engage with those people, particularly the regulars that come through the doors. But let’s talk something about that’s more of a long, protracted process. You just mentioned HireMyVA, right? We have this White Glove service. Why do you describe to the listeners and viewers, what do we do during that process? How do we engage with them?

Dave Braun
02:23:19
Yeah, that’s a good question. So our White Glove service and HireMyVA where we help find a Virtual assistant for you. We take care of all the details and work with you along the way, but we’ve got three different stages. The Prepare, Hire, and Thrive. And so that was part of the course. And so we turned that into service and we have calls with you to learn about your needs to help you, you with hiring somebody of course, and then thriving. So we have a call with you on the Prepare stage one at the higher stage. And we used to have one at the Thrive stage at the end of that. And I’ll tell you what happened with that, why we changed. And so, but what we decided to do early on is we said, let’s do quick surveys at the end of each stage.

Dave Braun
02:24:09
Yep. So at the end of the Prepare stage, we send a quick survey and we remind our clients to go ahead and fill it out, Click survey. We do that at the end of the Hire stage. We do that at the end of the Thrive stage. So we have it along the way. Part of the reason is because it’s a little bit longer pro— when we say protracted, it’s 2, 3, 4 weeks, whatever it is. One of the things is, that will help us to know if things are going off track with it.

Dave Braun
02:24:39
If they’re upset with the end of the Prepare call that it didn’t meet their needs. It’s like oh-oh, we better get on and do another quick call with them. So that’s what we did. And by doing these surveys, we had one client who was upset about something and we decided to insert a quick 15- minute call, which is supposed to happen one week after the new VA joins your team to see that, Hey, is there anything going on here in this first week? Are they showing up? Are they doing what they’re supposed to do? How’s your interactions going? Do you have this in place, this in place, this in place? And that’s invaluable. That’s invaluable doing it then. So yeah, we have those little surveys at each step of the way.

Larry Broughton
02:25:28
Yeah. So important to do. So important to do. And finally, I have more to do, but I mean, finally in kind of the process, what we try to do is then thank the client, the customer for actually giving you whatever information they gave you. Why is that? Because they just invested time in the growth of your organization. This is invaluable. Even bad reviews.

Larry Broughton
02:25:55
You know, if you can sift through because sometimes I get it, I get it, I get it. I’ve seen thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of reviews in the 30+years that I’ve been doing business. And I know that when someone has an elevated temperature because they’re pissed off at, well, we fell short somehow things get exaggerated. And I get all of that. But when you weed through all of the nonsense, rarely, and I mean, rarely does someone just make up a negative review to try to get something from you. And if they do sorry about their life, you know? Yeah. But generally, there are seeds of truth throughout the negative reviews. We gotta own it. We gotta own it. Particularly if you start seeing the same thing over and over again.

Larry Broughton
02:26:46
So because they invested time in the growth of your organization, be sure to thank them. And sometimes it’s a verbal thank you. Sometimes it’s a written thank you. Sometimes we’ve gone as far as actually sending people gifts, like, hey, their favorite one, I can remember one crystal clear that happened about 20 years ago. We just really fell short on the new opening of one of the hotels. And the GM, the one thing that they did put in their review is that they loved the coffee, it was a special blend roast coffee that we’d had made just for that particular hotel. And so the GM sent them five pounds of that coffee. And they end up becoming raving fan.

Larry Broughton
02:27:31
So, but just saying thank you if at a minimum you need to do that.

Dave Braun
02:27:36
Well, there was a do in there that I think we ought to expand upon maybe at some point. But the do is, take what they’ve said that they really liked and expand it somehow. Like you said with the coffee, they love the coffee. Your GM sent them that five pounds of coffee. What a great thing to do.

Larry Broughton
02:27:57
Well, the other thing I like to do when we can, Dave, is let the client know. Again, not if you own a convenience store, the transaction is that long. Okay? But with HireMyVA it’s a much longer one. For the hotel company, you got somebody who’s staying at the hotel for a couple of days, that’s a long process. If you own a restaurant, it’s probably a 40-minute like a, not a fast food restaurant, but a typical quick service or fine dining restaurant, it might be 45 minutes. Right? So your service interaction varies in length. So if it’s 30 seconds, you’re probably not gonna say, Hey, and at the end of the transaction we’re gonna be asking you for your feedback on it. Right? So use a little bit of discernment on this. But if you let them know upfront that you’re gonna be looking or asking them for their feedback, their radar goes up and it enlists them, you get them on your team. Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of the brand nowadays. You know, they gotta inside track, Oh, the GM or the owner or that team member asked me for feedback and how it was going today. People tend to be a little bit more generous with their information and you tell them, we’re doing this because we wanna be better.

Dave Braun
02:29:17
And people respect that and people like that. And people wanna participate, especially if you tell ’em ahead of time. So I think that we were alluding to it earlier, Larry and that we talked about keeping it simple.

Larry Broughton
02:29:31
Because this can get pretty complex if you’re not careful.

Dave Braun
02:29:35
Yeah. You can go down the rabbit hole of wanting to have all this information. And there’s nothing that frustrates me more than saying, Okay, I’m gonna do a survey and they, you know, have me click on a button here and there, and then it’s question after question after question. And then I’m like, I’m outta here.

Larry Broughton
02:29:50
Yeah. You bail, Right?

Dave Braun
02:29:51
Come on. So I think we’ve got a couple of good questions here and we can explain why we do it this way. So, when you keep it simple, here are some good questions. Here’s the first one, like, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, how would you rate your experience with blank, the service or product on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best? And so people are gonna, they’re gonna give a five, a nine, some people give a ten. We get a lot of tens. But one of the things that you can do is if somebody says, Well, it’s a nine out of ten, there’s something in the back of their mind that’s causing them not to give you a 10. And you wanna, you wanna find out what that is. So the way that you could do that is you could say to them, If you responded anything other than a 10, what could we do in your mind to make it a 10? So that gives them an opportunity to say, Well, I think I could, you could take it from a nine, 9 to a 10 by doing blank or not doing blank.

Larry Broughton
03:30:51
Yeah.

Dave Braun
03:30:52
And then here’s one other thing that we’ve discovered through doing surveys, Larry, we’ve been doing surveys since we’ve been working together on all of the programs and services that we do. Well, here’s one of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of people that give us tens. It’s just the way it is. Hopefully, if you excel at what you’re doing, people will give you a tent. But if they say they gave you a ten, and they leave it at that, then that doesn’t really give you that much information to do anything with. So we always want to add to that something like anything else you’d like to say or like to recognize a team member or how else we could improve. Because what we’ve had is we’ve had people give us tens and then they’re like, Well, you know, it’s awesome what you promised you gave us in spades and it’s great. But then they had a little suggestion at the end that, hey, you could improve it even more by doing this. Or it could be faster or maybe a little bit better, but they’re completely happy with what they got. That’s an extra little question to ask.

Larry Broughton
03:31:59
Yeah. Dave, I have seen some organizations over the years, try to simplify this to the extent where there’s one question they ask. Would you refer us to a family member or friend?

Larry Broughton
03:32:14
If you wanna keep it really super simple. So why is that important? Well, I’ll personally, I’m not gonna recommend any service or product if it’s crap, to a family or friend. Because it diminishes my credibility with them if I do that. And so if they say, no, I wouldn’t, then another like this if you’re doing it electronically. The drop-down menus. Would you like to expand on that by asking, answering these three questions, and whatever those follow-up questions?

Dave Braun
03:32:48
Yeah, those are good.

Larry Broughton
03:32:51
Now if you want, I’ve seen people do this when they say, they ask, Would you refer us to a family or friend? And you say, Yes, there’s a dropdown menu that says is there specifically someone we should reach out to. And you don’t have to answer. It’s an optional thing.

Larry Broughton
03:33:10
So you’re actually asking someone who’s just had a good experience with you for referrals. Referrals and word of mouth are so important. For crying out loud, we’ve taken out some of our clients through this referral blitz process. Referrals are powerful. So why not just ask somebody? You said you would refer us, here’s your opportunity.

Dave Braun
03:33:30
Or were you just lying? Those are great. So, folks, you can go either way with that, however you would like to do it. And I think one of the other things that are important, another do is that sometimes people, they get busy. You ask ’em and they’ll see your email or ignore your phone call for once one time. Or they’re ignoring it, maybe not intentionally, they think I’m gonna go get back to it and they don’t get back to doing it. So it’s important if they don’t respond to ask them a second time.

Larry Broughton
03:34:02
For sure. Yeah.

Dave Braun
03:34:04
At least a second time. And then a lot of times that’s when they will respond. They’ll be like, Oh yeah, I remembered I gotta do this. And they wanna do it.

Larry Broughton
03:34:13
And as you’re following up, just again, remind ’em why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because you wanna improve. You wanna make their next experience with you even better than it has been in the past. And one way to entice folks to fill out these surveys, here’s a do, is do consider offering some kind of reward for their feedback, entering them into a drawing, giving them a gift card to somebody this morning had mentioned about giving ’em a discount off a future experience with you, whether it’s buying a product or whatever. Now keep in mind if someone who’s had a negative experience with you and you’re gonna offer them a discount on a future product, that there’s zero value in that they’ve already had a crappy experience with you, 15% off their next experience is zero because they’re not planning on having an experience with you.

Larry Broughton
03:35:03
But I have seen folks who have offered, hey, by filling out the, particularly like if you’re trying to engage past clients that you’ve not communicated with for a while. Say, Hey, yeah, we’re making some changes in the organization. We’d love your feedback. And by filling this survey out, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, you’re gonna be entered into a pool for a hundred dollars Visa gift card, the possibility, check your state, make sure you’re allowed to do that kind of thing. But then people will, they’re more likely to give a little bit of feedback…

Larry Broughton
03:35:35
…to you for that. So.

Dave Braun
03:35:37
Yeah, it’s like, try it out, folks.

Larry Broughton
03:35:39
Yeah. Dave. Now there’s a variety of ways to do this, right? I mean, you can use things like Survey Monkey, you can do physical forms that you can fill out and have ’em fill ’em out manually. Your constant contact email thing, you can put a form in there. I’m sure there are software. You’re probably more up-to-date on the actual software for this stuff than I am. Maybe not. But what are your thoughts on software options for surveys? Do you know any?

Dave Braun
03:36:08
Well, yeah, you know, we’ve got the Survey Monkeys and the survey blank. So just choose whatever will work. Everything does work within a lot of your mail systems. Like you talked about MailChimp or Constant Contact or Drip active campaign, whatever. They will give you the opportunity to do it. You can design your own, which is good. You could do it as simple as making a Google form.

Larry Broughton
03:36:29
Yeah. There you go.

Dave Braun
03:36:30
And do that. You could add a form or a page, have your web designer do it on your website, and do it that way with a form plugin or something like that. That works too. Or you could just say, let’s go low tech. And do either call people up if you have their phone numbers or just say, send ’em an email with the questions and see what their response is. And if you don’t have that many clients, then just keep it simple. Keep it really simple.

Larry Broughton
03:36:59
Yes. But be consistent about it. I’m telling you this old school quote-unquote that you just said, calling people, you’ll find real power.

Larry Broughton
03:37:08
Real power. Because people know it takes guts to pick up the phone and call somebody, say, Hey, do you like me? I like you. Well, check a box. Yes or no.

Dave Braun
03:37:24
Yeah. So some of this stuff, when you’re asking those questions, or if you’re gonna actually send a personal email, I think it’s really important then, or call, it’s really important to preface that with what we talked about saying, I really wanna hear the truth I’m asking because I want the truth both good and bad.

Larry Broughton
03:37:43
Don’t sugar coat.

Dave Braun
03:37:44
Yeah. Don’t sugarcoat it. Because we as an organization wanna improve. We want to get better. And if we don’t know what we can do to get better, then we can’t. So it doesn’t help us if you hold things back. So please help us.

Larry Broughton
03:37:57
Yeah. And I would encourage you, I know that it takes guts to do this when you first start doing it. I get it. I was scared to death when we first started doing this. But it’s like anything, the more you do it, the more used to it you become. And you learn the tools of not taking things personally. And again, if you look at like going to the gym, I know that if I’ve not worked out like now for a long time when I go to the gym, it’s gonna suck. It is gonna suck for a long time until I get back into it. And then you look forward to it because you know it’s gonna feel so crappy while you’re doing it, but you’re gonna feel so good on the other side of it. And so I just encourage you to embrace it. Embrace it. And the less defensive you are during the process, the more forgiving I think the client or customer will be when they’re giving you the negative stuff.

Larry Broughton
03:38:56
Just be in receive mode is what we call it in the world of Dave and Larry. Just be in receive mode.

Dave Braun
03:39:04
Yeah. Before you make that call or you make that call before you send that email. Be in receive mode.

Larry Broughton
03:39:15
Yeah. Don’t do it if you’re angry.

Dave Braun
03:39:18
Yeah. Halt, angry, lonely, or tired.

Larry Broughton
03:39:24
Yes.

Dave Braun
03:39:25
Okay. Anything else sir?

Larry Broughton
03:39:27
That was a lot.

Dave Braun
03:39:30
I know that was a lot.

Larry Broughton
03:39:31
I encourage you, Hey, we’re in business to serve people. That’s a transaction. I’m giving you my time service product and in exchange, you’re giving me something back. And this is part of the process. And this is one way to build loyalty among customers and turn them into long-term clients. This is a powerful thing to do.

Dave Braun
03:39:54
So Larry, let’s practice what we preach. You folks listening are watching. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, how would you rate the content that we give you or delivery? All that kind of stuff. How would you do that? And then anything but a 10, which I’m sure we’re gonna get a lot of non-tens. Tell us what we can do better. If it’s certain episodes you want to hear certain, certain subjects. Do you want me to start wearing a hat as Larry does? You know, just whatever it is, let us know. Tell us how we can improve. And then of course, as Larry mentioned, why not tell us if you would refer us to a friend or some, a business owner to listen to what we talk about? And if not, why not? And if so, why?

Larry Broughton
04:40:44
Yeah. Very good.

Dave Braun
04:40:45
So put it in the comment. Send us an email, fill out a contact format at Hiremyva.com, or however you wanna do it. Give us that feedback. Well, thank you folks for being with us. We do really appreciate it. And remember, building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. Have that team help you implement these surveys and respond to that feedback. And of course, we’re here to help you with our Course and Community and our White Glove Service where we find a Rockstar VA for you. So there are three things we’d love for you to do and we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already done so, either on your iPhone or Android phone or on YouTube by hitting the subscribe button and clicking on the little bell next to it to get reminders.

Dave Braun
04:41:30
And then number two, give us a rating. This is relative to what I just talked about. Give us a rating, a five-star, whatever it is. But leave a comment, as I mentioned, about how we can improve, and what you want us to talk about. If you have any other insights that you wanna add to the conversation, give us a comment because it’ll help us to get the word out. And then the third thing is to go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our Course and Community and our White Glove Service. And remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for, hire and thrive with Virtual assistance. Larry, you know we’ve helped a lot of folks. I think we had a great Virtual spotlight session today. But we’d love to help you too. We’ve got some openings in that as well. But you can find out about us and all we have to offer there at Hiremyva.com.

Larry Broughton
04:42:17
That’s right. Hey folks, friends, and loved ones, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and go do something significant today. God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. We’ll see you next week.

Dave Braun
04:42:30
Okay, bye, folks.

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