Customer satisfaction has the potential to make or break your construction business; one happy customer can lead to three more leads who feel comfortable trusting your business - and this boosts your reputation. Alternatively, one unhappy customer can deter potential customers from choosing your business and may even have a negative impact your reputation in the long-term.

It’s tempting to think that just delivering a good product to your client is good enough, but it’s important to remember that at the core of your construction business is the people you serve and how satisfied they are with your services, including tangible things like the quality of the product and intangible things like how they felt working and communicating with your team. In this article, we’ll delve into everything you need to know about ensuring your customers are consistently satisfied with your business.

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction

One of the most important assets your construction business has is to consistently create satisfied customers. When you create happy customers, you simultaneously create a great lead generation source for your business via word-of-mouth.

Check out some of these word-of-mouth statistics from Semrush:

• 26% of people will completely avoid a brand if their friend or family tells a negative story about their experience. 
• 90% of people are much more likely to trust a recommended brand (even from strangers). 
• Out of the top five popular ways to recommend a business, word-of-mouth comes first, followed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
• Word-of-mouth is even more effective than paid ads, resulting five times more sales. 

In addition to those statistics, read what some of the world's most successful businesspeople have to say about customer service:

"If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."

- Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

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"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is."

- Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit

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"A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all."

- Michael LeBoeuf,
Author of How to Win Customers & Keep Them for Life

5 Ways to Ensure Customer Satisfaction

After our experience with helping hundreds of thousands of construction pros, we’ve compiled some best practices and recommendations that are surefire ways to ensure your business can create satisfied customers again and again:

• Set Realistic Expectations

In construction specifically, clients are usually relying on the builders’ expertise to help them achieve their end goal - they don’t know how long it takes to build a new home from the ground up or convert an old warehouse into a functioning restaurant. 

By providing clear guidance about the estimated timeline and budget, you lay the foundation for a more positive experience from the start and limit the potential for misunderstandings, disagreements, and other negative experiences. 

Additionally, setting good expectations about the processes related to the management and execution of the project can help to organize roles and responsibilities across the entire project team, prevent costly oversights and frustrating rework, and establish the best steps for addressing potential hurdles that may be encountered during the duration of the project. 

One way to set realistic expectations is to create a clear and concise project scope. A good project scope will make it easier for your client and your team members to know exactly what they should expect from this project so there is no ambiguity. 

• Be Open to Collaboration

In general, collaboration should be embraced in your construction business because collaborative teams see more well-rounded outcomes, increased efficiency, stronger team relationships, and overall higher quality results. 

The degree of necessary collaboration between your project team and your client can vary from project to project or client to client. For some clients, the willingness to collaborate factors heavily into their search for a contractor or vice versa (you may only sign clients who agree to specific parameters of collaboration that meet your preferences and/or established procedures), but no matter the degree, it’s important that there is some room for collaboration.

Your clients’ thoughts, opinions, wishes are key to their ultimate satisfaction, so being open to their ideas and desires in whatever areas possible is the smartest thing you can do. Every change made, every addition requested, every issue encountered leads to added costs & added time, derailing the project and diminishing the client’s experience, but through good collaboration, visions can be aligned, decisions can be made collectively, and potential issues can be identified and fixed or avoided altogether. 

• Agree to Measures of Success

It’s important that you and your client agree on the measures of success, because you are best able to strike the bullseye if you can see the target. How can you be truly effective if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve? 

In construction project management, this takes the concept of setting good expectations just a step further. You and your client(s) must agree from the start on what equals success for the project at hand so that you can prioritize project elements, allocate valuable resources, and manage efficiency and productivity. 

There are multiple measures of success you can use for your construction projects, but the 3 key measures for project success that almost every contractor can utilize effectively are budget, timeliness, and quality. Builders who have been around the block will surely have stories that illustrate these different KPIs, but here are a couple of hypothetical scenarios to give you a clearer idea:

> A custom home builder might tell you about the Tuscan-inspired villa he was building for a very well-to-do woman in Kentucky. She had carefully selected all the best, most authentic fixtures & finishes for her home - hand-painted tiles for the portico, the custom maple cabinets for the kitchen, imported stone for the fireplace in the study, and more. For her, the quality was incredibly important, as was the timeline - but money was no object. 

> A general contractor might tell you about the young entrepreneur working to expand his business, his team, and his earning potential. With limited capital and cash-in-hand, they focused on buildout elements that were cost effective and flexible, like choosing modular workstations over individual offices, opting for wireless networking solutions instead of hard-wired setups, and limiting initial aesthetic design options. For him, maintaining the established budget and completing the buildout as quickly as possible were key for the time being - higher quality adjustments could be added/updated down the line. 

• Outline Best Communication Methods

It’s essential for you and your client to maintain an accessible mode of communication so that your client knows all of the important information about how the project is progressing and what is needed from them at different stages.

From the start of any project, you should establish the best channels of communication - how they can contact you if/when needed, how they should expect to receive communication from you, where/how they can access project details and updates, and so on. Empowering your clients to reach the right people via the right channels at the right times sets everyone up for success and ensures a streamline, positive experience for them for the duration of the project.

For instance, many construction companies now offer clients the ability to login to an online portal to access their project information, communicate with the project team, and approve Change Orders, Selections, etc. To offer your clients the best experience, introduce them to the online portal of your choice like ConstructionOnline, and make sure they are able to login successfully and access their project, and show them the key locations of important information and correspondence.

• Be Helpful, Friendly, & Knowledgeable

No matter the industry, no matter the project, no matter the interaction, striving to be helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable are key guidelines for any professional interaction, including for construction professionals. These have always been the guiding principles of customer service here at UDA, and throughout the years we’ve found that these elements are critical to an excellent customer experience for the many construction professionals we help daily.

· Helpful: In this context, helpful means “as helpful as possible.” We’ll tell this to new Product Specialists starting on the COL Team, but take the time to help them reframe what it means to be “helpful.” It’s not about being the point of resolution for any and everything - it’s about being willing. Willing to listen, willing to assist, willing to support. It’s the idea that if a happy customer is my goal, then I’m willing to help create that happy customer in whatever way I can. Like the COL Team’s mantra - “My goal is your success.”

· Friendly: Pretty simple, but you would be surprised how often people forget this ingredient. “Customers are not an interruption to our work, but the reason for our work.” When you are bothered by a client, when you feel too busy to answer their questions, or when you think you have more important things to do, your clients can tell and that impacts their experience. Meet them with a strong handshake when onsite for a walk-thru, with a warm smile during an impromptu phone call, with genuine eye contact during a meeting.

· Knowledgeable: While this does include you and your subcontractors knowing information relevant to their roles and responsibilities, it’s also about knowing who the best resources on your team are for different kinds of information. This can help you better assist clients because in addition to telling them what knowledge you have, you can direct them to the right place for what they need when you don’t know something, and they will have more confidence in your team's overall expertise and ability.

Those are some of our essential tips and tricks for improving and maintaining customer satisfaction in construction.

If you’re looking for a project management software that can help you keep your clients in the know about relevant project information and give them a centralized way of communication with you and your team, schedule your free demo of ConstructionOnline, the simple and intuitive software for construction professionals worldwide.