While interviewing customers about their level of satisfaction will probably never land Carl Hendrickson a spot on anybody’s “most difficult jobs” list – at least as long as there are oil rig workers and Alaskan crab fishermen to compete with – our customers have a way of making his job pretty tough.
And this year they’ve done it again.
Hendrickson’s job, in fact, could be described as fishing, in a sense. Year after year, as President of Market Measurement Inc., he goes deep in search of the details that provide us with the things we need to do to keep our customers happy. And while happy customers are the overall goal, the survey is designed to net feedback that lets us know what we need to do better.
And on that count, frankly, Carl’s nets are pretty empty again this year, the 29th year of our annual Customer Satisfaction Survey. What are we supposed to do with data that shows “no significant untapped opportunities for improvement”?
It’s not that we aren’t grateful to all of you who told Carl’s team that you had no unmet needs or that you are “very likely” to renew and hold “very favorable” opinions regarding our service. It’s just that Carl’s job is to fish for areas in need of improvement.
It’s Hard Work Getting Our Customers to Tell Us What We Could Be Doing Better
In his defense, Hendrickson points out that finding opportunities for Roscoe to improve is not an easy exercise. “It gets tougher every year,” he says. As soon as something pops up, the Roscoe team develops an action plan for improvement and “it’s gone,” he says. Hendrickson’s team has to go deeper and deeper to get at any hint of dissatisfaction. “They don’t give us a lot to work with.” It’s tough work, but at least, he quips: “I’m not at risk of falling overboard.”
Here are a few highlights from this year’s catch:
• Over the course of interviewing nearly 40% of Roscoe’s uniform customers, the survey found a 95% rate of satisfaction.
• 70% of survey participants – under repeated questioning – could not identify a single “unmet need” – another all-time high.
• The level of customers who reported that Roscoe’s performance was equal to or above expectations for “completeness of delivery” (97%) and “garment quality” (95%) also reached all-time highs.
• 92% of respondents had their expectations met or exceeded for responsiveness and 93% reported the same for ease and quality of communication.
• A “net promoter score” – reached by a methodology that subtracts the lowest scores from the highest when asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending Roscoe on a scale of one to 10 – was 52%. This score is in the same ranks as Apple, Disney & Amazon.
• 90% of respondents said they were likely or very likely to renew.
Of course, we’re happy to see how hard Carl has to work to land responses that provide some room for improvement, like those who thought we could improve the “clarity and accuracy” of our billing or who saw room for improvement in the repair process. Those are results we can build a strategy around, no matter how small a catch. And that’s the whole point really.
Continuous improvement is the goal at Roscoe and the reason we continuously survey our customers and put our processes and policies through rigorous third-party assessment and review.
So thank you again to all of you who took the time to tell us what we are doing right and what we could be doing better. We couldn’t be any more grateful to our customers, who are the reason we will celebrate 100 years in business next month. This is their celebration as well as ours.
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