The money in your Customer Experience
The service, that your customers experience is a key component in your ability to secure customer loyalty.
For every company that declares as its
goal to be more customer-driven it is from the start crucial to understand the
company's position in relation to the customers: How do the customers perceive the
company's products and services? Are they satisfied with the products and
services that they buy? Do they think that there is an acceptable relation between price and quality? Which factors
influence the customers' satisfaction and loyalty? Is customer satisfaction
rising or falling, and what is the customers' evaluation of the company in
comparison with its competitors?
Companies that maintain an insight into
the customers' notion of satisfaction, quality, loyalty, or other strategic
success factors can better respond to developments while continuously working at
improving competitiveness at the
parameters most important to the customers.
Mass communication creates short-lived
expectations and interest among consumers - but it is the service that
customers and potential customers actually experience when they are finally in
touch with the company that creates lasting impressions and secures their
loyalty.
An extensive American study shows that 70
percent of the customer's purchase decision is based on how they feel they are
treated by the company. Thus, in spite of Multi-Channel contact possibilities
for customers, such as self-service systems and homepages, analyses show that
it is very difficult to create loyalty via these channels alone.
People deal with people
It is through personal contact, via
meetings or the telephone, that the basis for loyalty is created. This is why
more and more companies today base their customer contact on telephone service.
Unfortunately, most often the company has no idea how the customers actually
experience this contact; Does it ensure customer loyalty? Or does the contact
actually create dissatisfaction resulting in a negative influence on the annual
accounts' bottom line?
Therefore, it is imperative to make
certain that when a customer contacts the company an exceptional customer
experience is delivered.
It is our experience that the most
effective method to secure a good customer experience is to professionally work
with the employees who are facing the customers on the basis of factually
founded analysis identifying behaviors, that should be adjusted.
By questioning the customers about their
experience on different parameters it is possible to ensure the best service daily corresponding to the
strategic goals the company wishes to reach. This applies within areas other
than customer satisfaction as well, e.g. increased sales or customer retention.
A firmly rooted and continuous dialogue
will create the possibility of measuring the customers' satisfaction on
individual, comparable and defined parts of the company.
It will be possible, for example, for the
company to identify how the different sales teams within the same organization
perform in comparison to one another. Thus the company benchmarks the different organizational units in
relationship to one another or in relation to the customers' qualitative
satisfaction - and not only in relation to the purely quantitative goals such
as number of answered calls, number of sales, etc.
Information
only has value when it is used
The use of the customers' feedback and the
company's involvement of employees in the use of this data, while creating
visibility and the understanding of the necessity of altering behaviour in
certain areas, serve as the basis for ensuring a good customer experience.
The company can then systematically work
on improving the customer service starting from the customers' actual
experiences; the individual employee's behaviour has become the key to success
- this applies to both management and the individual employee.
This is what TeleFaction calls Return
on Behavior.
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Return on Behavior Magazine
