Understanding your Customers has always been important. But in recent years, with the rise of social media and online reviews, it has become more important than ever to make sure your customers are happy. The only successful way to do this is to create a customer centric culture; an environment in which addressing the needs of your existing customers and potential customers is the main priority for your business.
What Does Customer Satisfaction Mean?
But to address the customer's needs, you need to deeply understand what those pain points are.
Deep understanding is often easier said than done. To measure customer satisfaction levels you need to use qualitative customer research methods. Companies newer to customer experience and innovation too often leant towards the nice to have or the things that are in the delight category for customers, rather than those things that really deliver customer value. Attempting to satisfy your customers superficially, by only giving them what you think they want, is bound to fail. We have written about this before in our “Shiny iPad Syndrome” articles. The tendency to look to technology as a Silver Bullet over those things that customers truly value.
Customers value things like, returning calls when promised, not having to wait online for 10 mins or being able to log in quickly and easily. But this list is not exhaustive. You need to create a personalised customer experience. You need to conduct customer research, collect customer feedback, analyse customer surveys, and calculate your current customer lifetime value. You'll be amazed by how much market research reveals about your customer loyalty and the customer journey.
Why Should We Aim To Become A Customer Centric Business?
We believe that the greatest mission of any company is to make life better for its customers. And if you make a customer's life better in a material way, that customer will gladly share some of that value created with you. In doing so they will generate more profit and growth, give you feedback and give you their time. And your employees feel better about making customers' lives better as it provides them with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
How To Navigate The Path Towards Customer Centricity
Although the path to becoming a customer centric company is often overwhelming.
In this highly competitive environment, Organisations need a structured approach to really understanding their customer needs and working across the business to profitably deliver them. When thinking about your new product iteration or service improvement ask yourself how you might:
- Help people feel good about themselves when a salary reduction or concerning financial position has undermined their confidence
- Help them feel more in control in a world where too many things feel out of control
- Help them find comfort in the simple things in life
- Help them with increased transparency in a world that is increasingly opaque
- Help them feel fairly treated when they feel the pressure of managing changing circumstances
At this time it has never been more important to be clear on being brilliant at understanding your customers and working on your Value Proposition so you can present it in a way that your customers truly value. At this time, we have to work harder to make a sale, we will have to go to greater efforts to keep our customers. We will have to inject real energy to ensure we maintain our revenues.
9 Steps To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score
As we said at the outset of this article, understanding your customers better than your competitors has always been important, it's just that now, it is more important than ever.
Step 1 - define
Leaders won't invest in customer experience management unless they're clear about business objectives. Define your business goals and the challenge, along with key opportunity areas to get started.
Step 2 - Discover
You'll need to use quantitative research methods and qualitative data collection to develop a thorough study strategy. You won't understand how to improve terrible consumer experience into good customer relationship management if you don't have a plan for organising your consumer data.
Step 3 - Map
One of the most effective tools in your market research toolkit is customer journey mapping. It provides you with the capacity to map not just customers' experiences and interactions, but also staff ones. It's important to understand how your customer care team functions in a professional environment because if they aren't upbeat and together, they won't be able to deliver an exceptional client satisfaction rating. Before you try to put your customer experience plan into action, you must identify these moments of truth.
Step 4 - Synthesise
Your next step, after you have located the unmet customer service needs and pain points in your company, is to pass along this information to your customer service teams. This way, everyone will be working from the same page so that we can more efficiently target the jobs that need doing and address customers' needs.
Step 5 - Design
Looking ahead to the future is critical for a company's vitality. Developing key initiatives and identifying easy wins are two parts of Creating the Future State (Customer Value Proposition).
Step 6 - Align
You need to ensure everyone understands what needs to be done. This means a change in mentality, getting rid of barriers between departments, and making sure that the organisation as a whole agrees with this goal. Having the right customer-focused environment will lower the chances of failure and increase the likelihood of success.
Step 7 - Implement
After the quantitative researchers conducted their study, the team was aligned around the key outcomes, and there was a clear client experience strategy in place. It's now time to turn ideas into programs of work by agreeing on an implementation plan for what you want to change presently, next, and eventually.
Step 8 - Mobilise
You must now establish systems of responsibility to guarantee that your customer service team continues to execute the strategy. This implies changing regulations and processes to match consumer demands.
Step 9 - Sustain
When you make the customer your main priority, they will return the favour by staying loyal to your brand. Test this theory out by connecting your KPIs (key performance indicators) to outcomes that focus on the customer experience. This is an ongoing effort--you can't simply collect feedback once and call it a day. Get into the habit of constantly gathering data so you can identify new problems and figure out which areas of your customer service strategy are working well.
That said, don't forget to celebrate your team's successes. Recognition of organisational success is crucial to sustaining positive customer experiences.
If you would like to more deeply understand the 9 Steps we take to underpin the Creation of any Successful Growth Plan, click on the image below and download our 9 Steps to truly understand your customers.
If you would like to learn how to build out or improve your Value Proposition for your customers, members, clients or even internal Sales staff, click here to go to our page - Smarter Value Propositions for Smarter Organisations.
