It does not matter what business you are in, the truth is that customer satisfaction has a heavy bearing on your company’s profitability. In this article I will discuss several initiatives which could be used to increase customer satisfaction.
Transparency
Customers wish to know the why’s and how’s of what is going on, especially when it comes to their money. It is simply not enough to tell them that you have the best loan management software. They also want you to show them the methods and algorithms used by the software to produce results. Likewise they want to see statistics backing up your reason for choosing that software. Most of all they want your professional opinion on whether or not you give kudos to the software. When hearing your opinion customers would rather have you give them a mixed review and know that it’s honest then receive a glorious 5 star review if you can’t back up your opinion with facts. When a customer asks you your opinion what they’re really asking is whether or not they can trust you, because most of the time they have already formulated their own opinion.
Eye to Eye
This is a technique meant to initiate face-to-face communication. Sometimes we tend to be in too much of a hurry to literally raise or lower ourselves to our customers’ level. A common bargaining technique is to raise yourself above your counterparts in order to gain emotional leverage during the negotiation through the use of your physical presence. While this is a good technique during a negotiation, when we are communicating with our customers we do not want to fall into this habit. We need to remain relatable. Simply by sitting or standing to initiate conversation with our customers we can make them feel more comfortable and therefore increase their overall satisfaction with the experience.
Walk This Way
In this technique we choose to escort our customers from one destination to another. This allows us to maintain a rapport of caring and concern. It makes us relatable and makes them feel as though they’re being taken care of. All too often we see people ramble off directions and continue with their work. To the customer this says “I don’t really care whether or not you get lost,let me get back to work”.
Finish Strong
We can assume that all customer experiences are based on hills and valleys. If so, it’s easy to see why we really must finish strong. As the saying goes, everything has its ups and downs but if we finish on a down chances are that the customer will not be satisfied. A customer experience Hill occurs when their expectations are met. A Valley occurs when their expectations are not met. If the last experience a customer has is a Hill they will remember the experience in whole as a good experience, and will tend to be overall satisfied. Likewise if the last thing a customer remembers is a Valley they will be over all dissatisfied.
We live in a digital world where an individual customer’s satisfaction does not only affect whether or not that customer will return. It also affects the customer’s review which in turn can affect whether or not future customers choose your company. For this reason customer service should be a primary goal in any companies initiatives.
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