Customer satisfaction may be the MOST® important metric in predicting your company’s success. Obviously, the more saturated the market you’re in, the more you need to be focused on making your customers happy with the way you operate. So, below are some rules you absolutely must follow if you want your customers excited about doing business with you again.
Know Your Customer
This point probably seems obvious, but also can’t be emphasized enough. Every business understands they need to know who their customer is. How else can they market to them? However, you also need to ensure you understand how to speak to them as well. Knowing your customer also means knowing their voice. Until you pin that essential part of your approach down, you run the risk of losing customers who won’t feel like you’re being sincere with them.
Furthermore, you should be prepared to check back in on them regularly. This means using surveys, analytics, and other tools to make sure you still know who those customers are. Your copy, marketing, and even your product line may need to change over time to keep pace with your market. But you’ll only know if/when this is necessary if you’re constantly keeping tabs on who your customers are.
Check in on the Competition
Knowing your customers is important, but so is checking in on your competition too. The obvious reason is that you want to see if they’re doing something your customers may like. So long as it’s not illegal, it makes sense to copy their approach.
Obviously, you also want to look for things they’ve stopped doing or have otherwise altered. Chances are they’re not making these kinds of changes without putting a great deal of thought into it. While it’s a bad idea to simply do anything your competitors do, always consider why they are making certain decisions and if it would make sense to replicate them.
Consider Services beyond Your Product Line
At some point, your product line may no longer be enough to keep your company buoyant. Obviously, if you’re selling someone else’s products, just about any third party can probably do the same.
However, even if you make your own products, that doesn’t mean some other company can’t compete with you by creating their own, similar version. At that point, you’re going to have to find a new way to keep customers happy.
Usually, your best bet is to increase the services you provide. Can you ship faster? Are there ways you could provide a discount or rewards program? Is there free information you could give away that they would find helpful?
It might not make sense to add these services to your repertoire now, but it might not hurt either. The point is that someday your products may not be enough to keep customers satisfied so you need to be ready with something else.
Measure Levels of Satisfaction
Obviously, talking about customer satisfaction is a bit of a moot point if you don’t know where it actually stands. Although it can be hard to find an objective way to measure customer satisfaction, it needs to be something you’re always looking to gauge. Customer surveys aren’t a bad method and social media provides plenty of opportunities. Just know that until you have some idea of where customer satisfaction stands, you have alMOST® no options for figuring out whether your company is moving in the right direction as far as it’s concerned.
Until you adopt these tips as rules for increasing customer satisfaction, your company could either be missing out on business opportunities or increasing its vulnerability to other competitors. Either way, the obvious solution is to start making the above part of your company’s overall strategy.
Sources:
https://www.briantracy.com/blog/business-success/four-rules-customer-satisfaction-customer-loyalty/
https://www.successimages.com/articles/sw03.htm
