Ever wonder how much it costs your favorite pizza chain to offer all those free pizzas to customers who fill out a satisfaction survey? The exact numbers may be a mystery, but you can bet it is a lot. They can afford to do this because performance feedback is critical to business. You could imagine how a business with less competition might be able to get away with not worrying about it too much, but in green industry business we have to pay close attention to our performance standards in order to survive. Read on for some tips on how to utilize performance feedback to make sure your business succeeds!
- Conduct an Employee Satisfaction Survey – Make it anonymous and act on negative feedback
Try not to make an employee satisfaction survey personal. Think employees and company – don’t single out any employee/employer. While you want to listen to the positive feedback, make sure to acknowledge any negative feedback. Employees are also more likely to be satisfied when they feel that they have a part in the decision making of an organization.
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Join a Peer Group
Joining a peer group can enable you to get new ideas, advice, and you can benchmark your performance against other green industry businesses. Bench marking is a good way to gain an advantage because if you have an understanding of your competition’s standards, you will be less likely to lose customers to competitors with a higher quality service. This applies to the other way around as well - if your competitors are successful with putting less time and money into their services and charging their customers less, you could benefit from adjusting the amount of resources you put in to your services and/or the amount you charge your customers.
- Conduct a Customer Satisfaction Survey - if your customers aren't satisfied, the fault may lie with you
Looking to your competitors can offer valuable insight on what your customers are looking for in your services and how much they’re willing to pay for them. But a customer satisfaction survey can give you even more precise feedback in this area. Just be sure not to be too aggressive with it. Don’t make it too time consuming, and make sure your customers don’t feel forced to take the survey.
- Attend Industry Trade Shows
Last but not least - don’t overlook this one. While looking to your larger business competitors might not be the best strategy in other more rapidly changing industries, the green industry business is much more stable. Your servicing methods might change slightly as newer more efficient technologies become available (for example: your favorite lawn mower manufacturer develops a new functional lawn mower that runs on solar power, opposed to gasoline), but the industry hasn’t changed much relative to the computer industry, for example. And it doesn’t look like it could change much in the foreseeable future either. This means that industry veterans, who have spent a lifetime perfecting their methods, can offer some of the best guidance that you can achieve.
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