Customer Surveys

Customer Surveys

Postby jtr8178 » Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:04 pm

I am looking for a company that provides the service of customer satisfaction surveys (Either calling or providing a follow-up letter). At this point, I'm open to pretty much anything.

Our manufacturers provides nothing (Navistar & Mitsubishi Fuso), and I get just about 0 feedback from customers. I have the feeling we think we are doing a great job, but we really aren't.

Also, for those of you that have some type of service, any tips or helpful hints for me? What should I look for? Do customer satisfaction surveys even give you any helpful information, or are they a waste of money?

Thanks in advance!

PS. I work for a heavy-duty truck dealer (class 7 & 8 trucks mainly), not a car dealer
jtr8178
 

Customer Surveys

Postby carguy2 » Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:16 pm

Which computer system do you use?
carguy2
 

Customer Surveys

Postby btk » Wed Oct 25, 2006 5:18 pm

Do you currently have a follow up program in house? Do you have a cashier or someone who can perform a follow up thank you call and solicite some feedback? That will help you get a better gauge on customer satisfaction.
I would hope there would be some kind of benchmarks that you can get from the manufacturer on performance of like service departments or some sort of starting point-you want to compare apples to apples.
There are thousands of companies that do follow up surveys that you can employ.
If you think you are doing a good job but are not sure, I would start by looking in your data base for inactive customers,if you have alot of inactive customers based on your entire data base of customers that might tell you something is not right. But this number may be deceiving if you have nothing to compare it to. Also if you company submits a financial statement to the manufacturer, they probably have some sort of benchmark report to see if their dealers are doing a good job-might have to ask around
btk
 

Customer Surveys

Postby GMFXDOPSMGR » Wed Oct 25, 2006 5:32 pm

jtr,
Here is a company I have used for several years. Kathy L Knight & Associates
318-680-1839 e-mail: kathy@klknight.com

Her company does this by letter or phone or both if needed. They can do your survey any way you want, ask the questions you want, create things just like you want.

Give her a call. I called to ask if she would do heavy truck, her response was I can help anyway he wants.



------------------
Tom Edwards
GMFXDOPSMGR
 

Customer Surveys

Postby jtr8178 » Wed Oct 25, 2006 6:01 pm

1) I post ADP.

2) Checking for inactive customers in our business is difficult. Since we are dealing with trucks, a large portion of our business is "passing through" and we make repairs for the transient customer.

3) Thank you for the lead on the phone #, I will give her a call tomorrow

We do have a cashier, who is also our warranty administrator. We thought about having her take the task of calling customers and doing the surveys, but we aren't sure what questions to ask, and how to do it. Plus, she knows a lot of the local customers. I'd rather have a stranger, as i think i would get more truer answers. Also, I'd rather not re-invent the wheel, I prefer to have someone do it that knows what the heck they are doing.

I've checked with our OEM, there is nothing available. There is one company they recommend, and I talked to them. The problem was that they need access to our business system. Apparently the way ours is setup, is that the vendor would have wide open access to everything. Sounds like a dumb way to setup our internal network, but thats another story.

Thanks for the help so far, if anyone else has worked with a company and has had good experiences, please let me know!
jtr8178
 

Customer Surveys

Postby carguy2 » Wed Oct 25, 2006 8:25 pm

ADP has a follow survey system available. Contact your truck territory manager.
carguy2
 

Customer Surveys

Postby MHirn » Thu Oct 26, 2006 9:09 am

ADP does have a follow-up solution called "Customer Touch" in which they have just added a new "CSI" package.

As carguy2 stated I would contact your ADP Rep.
MHirn
 

Customer Surveys

Postby jdunn » Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:42 pm

we use an outfit called the Listner Group.
nice surveys e-mailed back to the dealership
with comments and ansers to a list of questions you define. they download from dms system so the whole program is on autopilot. 1-877-616-8363 ask for james garlock.
jdunn
 

Customer Surveys

Postby jtr8178 » Sat Dec 09, 2006 9:19 pm

Just a follow-up on this... I ended up going with Knights & Associates, and absolutly love it. They do a great job, and Kathy has been very easy to work with.

We have 5 locations, and our 2nd location just signed up. We hope to eventually get all 5 stores going.

For the fee she charges, we are estatic about the results we receive. Its the first time our company has ever been proactive, and we've already had some very positive results from it.

Tom -- Thank you again for the referral, and I would highly recommend her to anyone else looking for a similar service.
jtr8178
 


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