Bob Webb depends on his
past customers to draw new ones to his custom home-building business, so he knows
he’d better treat people right.
As president and founder of the
$50 million Bob Webb Group,
he understands that customer
satisfaction is the lifeblood for
his company to survive and
grow, so he strives to satisfy
each and every customer so
that they’ll spread the word.
Smart Business spoke with
Webb about how he now
gauges customer satisfaction
through surveys instead of just
assuming people are happy.
Measure yourself. How do you
measure your business if you
don’t have that information
coming back in some way? I
don’t know. There might be
other ways you get that, but
somehow you have to find
out what that customer actually thinks of you after the
process is done and you’ve
got their money.
Customer satisfaction is the
biggest indicator of the job
we’re doing, and we do surveys of our past customers.
We’ve probably done that in
the last 15 years or so. Before
that, we just assumed they
were happy.
If there’s something that you
see popping up more often,
you try to fix it. You learn all
the time. We learned that
we’re not perfect, which we
thought we were.
The business today is much
more competitive than it ever
was before, and every year,
you have to get more creative
and follow up on every possible avenue or lead or source of
business you can get.
Most everything you do
costs a lot of money, but for
the benefit, it’s certainly
worth doing because we can
correct a problem. If we
have a problem that starts
showing up, we can get it
fixed, so I think no, it’s not
expensive. It’s the cost of
doing business.
You can run all the surveys
you want and get all the
information you want to get,
but if you don’t follow up on
it and take advantage of it,
it’s worthless. I think companies do that. They think it’s
the proper thing to do, but
they don’t get the results
back, and they don’t study it
and don’t decide what to do
with what they found out.
Delegate. I started out as a oneman show, so one of the first
things that was hard for me to
do was delegate responsibilities, but the more I started
doing it, the easier it was.
Being able to do that is very
important. People who start
out in a large company don’t
know things to be any different, but when you’re the only
person there that’s doing all
the tasks, you always think
you can do it better than the
person hired to do the job.
That’s not necessarily so, and
the quicker that you realize
that you can’t do it all and you
can’t do everything the best,
the better off you are.
You just have to give it up.
It’s like having a kid when you
send them to college. You’ve
got to turn them loose. You have to start somebody on a
job who you have confidence
in, that you’ve spent enough
time with, that you know
they’re very capable. You just
have to give them the room to
show you that you can.
Create a staff you trust. It takes
time. You can interview people, but until you get them into
your organization, you don’t
know how they’ll fit in and
what they’re capable of doing
and how motivated they are to
do that.
Give them an environment
they can succeed in, and when
they do, recognize that. Everybody likes that about as much
as money. We all need that pat
on the back occasionally. We
need to be recognized by the people we work with that we
are doing a good job and the
people that are their bosses
recognize that.
That’s throughout the company. That includes the carpenter or whatever job they
have. It’s equally important to
everybody.
Don’t be complacent. One of the
best pieces of advice I ever got
was never be complacent
about your business. About the
time you think that you’re pretty good at what you do, if you
really take the time and look
around, you’re not as good as
you think you are. These surveys might tell you that.
Our business, and I’m sure
in most business today, it’s
changed more in the past
10 years than in the previous 30 years, and you really have
to be on your toes and do a
much better job all the time.
Any product you build, as
soon as you build it, go back
and think, ‘Is it as good as you
can get it?’ Go back a month
later and say, ‘OK, I could have
done this a little bit better or
that a little bit better.’ That
could be some function in
your office. It could be the
way you track your costs or
how you estimate a job or
whatever.
Your customer might tell
you a few things about it,
and as many times as you
look at it, you don’t see it,
but they do.
Associate Editor Kristy J.
O’Hara also contributed to
this story.
HOW TO REACH: Bob Webb Group, (740) 548-5577 or www.bobwebb.com
