All of us get customer feedback when things don’t go according to plan. When the wrong color of tile is being installed, or the front door doesn’t have the stained-glass sidelight, we certainly hear about it. But what about all the other things that only go a little wrong, or all the things that go right? We often don’t hear a thing about them. While knowing about the things that are glaringly wrong is very important, to NOT know about the little things that go wrong, or about the things that go right, robs us of the big picture on how our business is performing.
The little things going wrong actually end up being one big thing that can’t even be expressed easily. When a crew is late one day, when the job is delayed several hours, when the baseboard needs to be reinstalled on one side of of one room, when a plumbing fixture arrives in the wrong color and when a customer doesn’t get an answer to a question within hours the sum total of these little glitches takes on a life of its own. Sure the deficiencies get fixed, sure it was only one time the crew was late and sure the delay was inevitable. But it’s a sad fact of life that people focus on the things that don’t go right more than they focus on the things that do so these little things add up in the customer’s mind until when asked for references by someone who needs your kind of work done they offer your company as the third alternative rather than the first.
The customer feedback for all of the things that go right on the job is often simply summed up in their joy with the completed job. For a business owner that doesn’t get into the kind of detail you need to have. You need to know why your clients especially liked the plumber. What was it that particular sub did to make that happen? You need to know why the framers have a higher degree of respect for the concrete contractor you used this time as compared to the one on the last job. You need to know why your material supplier all of a sudden started getting loads to you ahead of time. Getting the answers to these questions often involves simply asking but if you aren’t in the habit of looking for what’s going right you won’t even think to ask.
There’s an old saying that goes like this: The job isn’t done until the paperwork’s done. In this instance the job isn’t done until you have asked for customer and team feedback at job completion. This is what gets you the kind of data that you can use to make long-term improvements to how you operate. Looking for what’s going right needs to also be an integral part of how you operate.
