Improving and Maintaining Customer Satisfaction

Over a million people a month use ServiceMagic.com to find referrals for tradesmen of all kinds; they’re the #1 referrals source on the internet. With 45,000 duespaying professionals in their database, keeping their pool of customers happy is a priority task - one that Key Survey is helping them to accomplish.

"We have over 500 categories of professional on our site," said customer service manager Jeremiah Knief, "Anything from landscapers to maid services, electricians and home remodeling."

ServiceMagic doesn’t just compile lists of contractors; they screen for relevant permits and certifications, and compiles a fairly extensive referrals database. Their revenue comes from tradespeople and contractors, who pay to be listed - customers don’t pay anything to use the service.

When service counts, Key Survey will help you ensure that it’s done right.

Customers do, however, have to be kept happy. They’re why ServiceMagic’s contractors stay asssociated, after all. Part of ensuring quality is measuring quality, and ServiceMagic has two ways of doing that - an outbound phone team, and Key Survey.

The surveys are emailed to the customers; using Key Survey’s autofill feature, pertinent data such as which contractor the customer dealt with, is automatically filled in - invisibly to the customer. This allows ServiceMagic to link customer opinions to customer records. Until recently, ServiceMagic also used a lot of Key Survey’s advanced features.

"The surveys that we started with had several questions with branching and logic and the whole nine yards," Knief said. "What we’ve since done is reduced it down to two questions, the first being ‘would you refer us to a friend or colleague?’, and if they answered that negatively, we’d ask why.

Use Key Survey for sophisticated, high-logic surveys. Or simple ones.

A large part of the impetus for this came from an article in the Harvard Business Review, The One Number You Need To Grow, by Fred Reichheld. Another part of it came from reasoning that more customers were likely to respond to a shorter survey than a longer one, however focused the longer one was. This reasoning proved correct; ServiceMagic’s response rate almost doubled, from about 5-7% to 10-12%.

"The information didn’t lead to any big changes," said Knief. "But it did confirm what we thought and what we anticipated learning. And it did lead to some specific changes for some representatives because we’d look at a particular representative who had a lower-than-average satisfaction score; there’d be discussion with them, possible coaching, et cetera."

The shorter, simpler survey is allowing ServiceMagic to gather similar aggregate data on their representatives’ performance.

Embed your own data in surveys, invisibly to respondents.

"We follow up," Knief said, "by calling them and asking what was the experience like, was it bad, was there anything we could do to make it better, just trying to get back on their side."

Key Survey doesn’t just help ServiceMagic to provide better service; through their ease of use and their own service, they make it easy for them to do so.

"We’d done some research into other survey products," Knief said, "and I must say that you guys have the easiest interface I’ve run into as far as learning it. The branching and logic were easy to learn. I was actually a little bit surprised because when it was first handed to me, I just got up and took off with it."

Key Survey is easy to use. And if you do have problems, the customer service is first-rate.

Knief also praised Key Survey’s customer support - when he’s had problems, they were solved quickly and without trouble. And that, of course, makes it easier to do his own job.

"It’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of customer service," Knief said. "It helps us to put a more human face on it - and I definitely know that a couple of customers I talked to were just glad to be asked, you know."

"I think Key Survey has been great; I know their customer service has been excellent. The ease in creating a survey has been great. It’s really helped us to efficiently improve our customer service," said Zurcher.