Wouldn’t you really rather know what your customers think of you?
Running a regular customer satisfaction programme is an essential strategy that businesses use to retain and grow their customer base. It’s a process of measuring satisfaction levels by collecting feedback from clients and using those insights to improve your business edge.
Some years ago, the agency I worked for sent me to Havard to learn about customer satisfaction processes designed to improve performance in the service industry. On my return, I implemented what I had learned. As a result, my agency subsequently ran a hugely successful customer satisfaction programme for many years. This survey (conducted twice a year) became a mainstay of our customer service programme.
A customer satisfaction programme enables you to better understand your client’s true feelings about your services. By collecting this feedback, you can identify their pain points and areas of dissatisfaction. You then use this information to adjust your services accordingly. This definitely helps to improve the overall customer experience, leading to increased customer retention, loyalty and advocacy.
But the key point is to gather customer feedback in a way that makes clients feel they can give an honest opinion without upsetting anyone. Consequently, the survey results must be highly confidential and your clients need to be made acutely aware of this. Ideally, a third party should be engaged to run the survey for you. This way, clients felt they are able to be more honest about their levels of satisfaction without directly putting anyone’s noses out of joint. Terra Ferma Media operates exactly this type of customer satisfaction survey for clients, using a slick, online survey tool.
By showing that you care about your clients’ opinions and experiences, you demonstrate that you value them as customers. Again, this leads to increased customer loyalty and advocacy, as well as positive word-of-mouth referrals. Stronger relationships with customers can even provide an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services, further driving business growth.
By collecting feedback and using it to improve your offerings, you often differentiate yourself from competitors who may not be listening to their customers. This can help you gain a competitive edge in the marketplace, leading to increased market share and profitability.
But most importantly, a customer satisfaction programme can help you identify and address potential issues before they become major problems. By collecting feedback on a regular basis, you can detect patterns and trends that may indicate underlying issues. Addressing these issues early can help prevent customer churn and negative word-of-mouth, protecting your brand reputation and revenue.
So there we have it; running a customer satisfaction programme among clients is an essential strategy for improving and maintaining your business edge. It’s been a while but Terra Ferma Media is practising what we preach. Our next customer satisfaction survey goes out in early May.
If you would like us to run something similar for your business, just get in touch and we can show you how it’s done.
