06 March 2015

It appears to be all the rage that any retail or service provision business, absolutely and without fail, must email their customer to ask how the customer service was, as soon as they’ve bought said goods or service.

Unfortunately this extends to items bought online for very small sums of money.

You know the sort of email, ‘Thank you for buying our £1.99 ski goggle wipe, please take a few moments to fill in our feedback survey’. I truly wonder if anyone has the time or inclination to give their feedback.

And it can be worse. I do from time to time fill in feedback forms where the item is of higher value or the service was particularly good (or bad). Yet recently after filling in a form and mentioning how easy the company concerned was to deal with, that company then blotted its copy-book by sending the same request for feedback again a few days later.

The point is, every customer will have different tolerances to this kind of feedback chasing. Of course, this makes the retailer’s job very difficult.

However, I suspect price (or at least ‘value to the customer’) plays a large part, and this is where I think things simplify for automotive retailers. This gives franchised retailers an advantage.

People buying cars are investing a lot of money so are, arguably, happier to give feedback. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they expect to give feedback about their buying experience and the car they’ve bought.

However, if traditional CSI surveys always score every retailer at between 90-95% positive then there really isn’t a value to this feedback.

So if retailers have customers wanting to give feedback, then all that’s needed is some new thinking on customer satisfaction. And on 14th May Auto Retail Network aims to offer exactly that. Our New Thinking in Customer Satisfaction event will take a new look at this whole area.

So if you want to join us for the discussion, then you can find out more and sign up here: www.newthinking-csi.co.uk, I look forward to seeing you there.

Tristan Young

Tags: email customers, retail service follow-up