You and your agency staff deal with many clients and prospects daily. You have contact information for all of your clients. If you don’t, please consider automatically getting email addresses at every contact to supplement your database. The first thing you should ask of any non-customer contacting you is for their phone number and email address (in case you lose the connection and need to get back to them). If they don’t give it to you, please question the validity of the contact – most pure price shoppers are simply wasting your time.
Assuming that you have or get contact information for every contact, what do you do with it??
The most advanced agencies understand that the value of the agency is based high customer retention. And customer retention depends in great part on how the clients feel about your interactions. Are they pleased and look forward to contact with you or do they treat contact with your agency like the need to contact the Department of Motor Vehicles – they feel they need a stiff shot of an adult beverage before confronting DMV representatives who the customer expects will not be particularly helpful nor cooperative. Believe it or not many people feel the same way about calling their insurance agent.
Of course, that would NEVER apply to YOUR AGENCY’S customers, would it? But, really, how would you know unless you actually asked each customer for his/her feedback regarding the contact with your agency.
Here is an example of an excellent customer review response from the agency. The only thing that was asked was for a rating of one star to five stars and a block for comments:
| Thank you for leaving a review! Can you take a moment to share? |
| We are grateful for your positive review. We use reviews to help improve our service, train our employees, and complement our associates. We would really appreciate it if you would share your review on our social media and review sites as well. This allows us to attract more customers and to continue to grow our business. We have worked hard towards providing the best possible service and would love if you could share your experience with others on at least one of our social media sites. Thank you! Your Review: (5 Stars) Polite, friendly and attentive. Quite fast. |
Whether the review is positive or negative, it is valuable for you to know what the customer thinks of the agency and its staff. If positive, ask them to share on all forms of social media in which you participate. This builds traffic on your site and people who visit your site would prefer to see comments made by your customers to kudos about your excellent service created by you.
If the comment was critical or negative, you should contact the client directly and resolve the issue to the best of your ability. If your goal is excellent customer service, you need to react to negative comments.
Let’s put our money where our mouth is regarding the desire and expectation of excellent interaction with our customers.