4 Principles to Go Beyond Just Customer Satisfaction And Achieve More

Before we discuss about the use of business growth technology to go beyond just customer satisfaction and achieve more, here is what the research from Gallup (an American analytics and advisory company based in Washington, D.C) and other research organizations says:

“If you are trying to boost up your rate of repurchases and overall customer loyalty, then for that customer satisfaction is never just enough.”

This is because, in order to increase the advocacy levels and customer loyalty of your brand, you need to exceed customer satisfaction. Rather you need to buy a business growth technology solution like easy to use CRM and conduct a customer feedback program that will provide you with all the insights to illustrate how to improve.

Therefore, here are four fundamental guidelines for creating a solid customer feedback program after you buy CRM – since failing to follow them can make you veer off course.

However, primarily we must know what can good customer feedback do for our businesses?

High-quality customer feedback can provide your business with the desired insights to take your company’s customer satisfaction scores to the next level.
In fact, at its best, customer feedback is a discipline that is research-driven which therefore requires solid insights to improve the customer experience of your brand.
This is because customer feedbacks help in exploring friction points, customer successes, and missed opportunities in your business and hence it is a way to stay on top of customer issues with your business processes and offering(s).

Customer feedback can address critical customer-facing questions like:

Did our representatives answer your questions in totality?

Was your product repaired to your desired satisfaction?

Perse, it can also tackle strategically placed concerns like:

What would you like us to do to make our customer service better than our competitions?

How can we boost our customer satisfaction and also sales?

When these questions are asked correctly customer feedbacks can provide you more insights, greater accountability and a lens in the details that will ultimately boost the happiness of your customers.

Now, onto the Principles…

Principle #1

Be Objective

What is the point in doing a customer feedback survey using your email campaigning feature in easy to use CRM, if the data captured cannot reflect what is really going on with your customers?

We say this because we have observed several customer satisfaction surveys and many other customer feedback methods that suffer from biased and uneven representation of facts and data.

The complete guideline for the objectives can fill an entire book; nevertheless here are three best practices:

1. Use an accurate sample
   Try to find out, by asking yourself, how well the customer feedback sample represents your customer base.Ensure that your sample is statistically valid, random and representative. That implies if only one type of customer is providing feedback then your data can be skewed.
2. Abolish bias
   Eradicate leading statements, double-barreled questions, skewed scales, and other subjective constructs.For example, instead of asking the customer in the feedback survey: “How satisfied you were with our services?” (Thereby suggesting that the customer was at least somewhat satisfied) ask questions that are more pertinent and neutral like “How would you rate the quality of our service?”
3. Ensure replicability
   The information collected from the customer feedback surveys in your CRM database must be such that any analyst with your data should be able to apply your methods and finally arrive at the same conclusion, be it by coding, assessing or categorizing the data.

Principle #2

Use the Best Methods

Even though in general surveys are the default method for evaluating the customer satisfaction of any brand, however sometimes there are even better tools.

These other methods for evaluating and measuring customer satisfaction include:

1. Mystery shops
   This customer satisfaction gauging method reveals real insights into customer service, especially in specific scenarios. In fact, this is also a great way to compare your brand to your competitors.
2. Customer interviews
   This customer satisfaction gauging method provides an in-depth view of your customer’s expectations pitted against their true experiences and is also a great way for uncovering issues that you did not know to ask about.

Principle #3

Engage Your Customers

Creating the right engagement is the ultimate foundation stone of customer satisfaction. Therefore keep your surveys relevant and short as if they are too long or ask irrelevant questions, it can alienate your customers.

Now, in the context of your surveys it means:

1. Ask compelling questions
   Use conversational style verbiage in your surveys so that your customers feel at ease and actually want to share their experiences with your company.
2. Use dynamic logic to keep the questions relevant
   All customers are different, so apply branching logic to allow your customers to answer only those questions that apply to them.
3. Add small tokens of gratitude
   Thank your customers for their effort and time by providing them things like gift cards, priority codes and others, so that they will give their valuable feedbacks even in the future days to come.

Principle #4

Take Analysis Seriously

This is where insights found from easy to use CRM software platforms and other business growth technology solutions come into play.

Provide your customer feedback processes its due diligence and use the right insights to find the signals among all the noises while doing your analysis, which implies:

1. Evaluate what drives your outcomes
   Simply viewing and analyzing the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score is not enough. Rather you must prioritize them to take your next steps and actions.
2. Parse and categorize the comments
   Segment your customer feedback data to uncover themes by scientifically categorizing and parsing unstructured data like open-ended comments of your customers in your CRM database.

Conclusion

These principles are all interconnected and therefore naturally affect the outcomes of each other. Hence, do your research before creating your customer feedback survey and sending them using Sales Force Automation in your CRM.

As we even said earlier, customer feedback is a research discipline, and so if you are not scientific in our approach, you will not be able to gain any actionable insights that can boost customer satisfaction and thereby grow your businesses’ bottom line.