by Interactive Northwest, Inc.
Turn Up the Dial on Customer Satisfaction
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Customer satisfaction is a key component to business success. Whether your organization is a retail brand selling products, a professional services firm providing differentiated value, a government agency serving constituents, or a non-profit entity engaging supporters and beneficiaries, providing a convenient experience for your audience drives allegiance and future success.
We recently discussed five practical ways to make real progress reducing customer effort. We also evaluated the three key types of customer satisfaction surveys. In this article, we will focus on a strategic approach to developing an effective customer feedback program that strengthens loyalty and enhances customer lifetime value.
Close the Feedback Loop
Many organizations rely on intuition to understand their customers. Others do a fair job of gathering and even analyzing customer information but may not close the loop by allowing customer data to drive continuous improvements. In order to realize the true benefits of customer feedback, it is important to keep a strategic focus that emphasizes acquiring actionable data, implementing changes based on that data, and verifying the success of new programs that have been put into place.
5 tips for developing an effective customer feedback program
1. Assess the Financial Impact
It is important to understand how an organization’s interaction with its customers can affect the overall value and duration of the customer relationship. Positive and negative interactions have a huge impact on profitability.
Capturing data that is directly related to revenue provides information that encourages executive buy-in. If you are able to show how your customer feedback program will bring value to the bottom line, you’ll have greater support. Likewise, changes are more likely to have a broader scope, shaping organizational objectives rather than just short-term departmental changes.
2. Understand the Customer Lifecycle
Define the stages of your customer’s journey with your product, services, or company. Consider the goals for each of the stages from initial interest and purchase, through the delivery and support processes, all the way to next purchase and/or end of product life. Each phase should end with a clearly defined action that you desire from your customers. Having an understanding of these phases before you begin will ensure that your program captures relevant data from each stage of the decision-making process.
3. Clearly Define What You Want to Measure
Carefully examine the influencers that drive satisfaction, and move customers toward the desired outcome at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Focusing your surveys and metrics around these critical drivers of customer engagement will ensure that you’ll collect meaningful data.
4. Tie Surveys to Actionable Objectives
It is important to keep the feedback you collect closely tied to products, services, or programs your organization can respond to. If the data is precise and actionable, you’ll have greater success moving customer sentiment in a positive direction.
For example, asking if a customer is satisfied with your organization may be interesting, but asking if they are satisfied with your product user interface or measuring their response to a newly implemented self-service application will give you clear data on improvements that will enhance customer satisfaction.
5. Verify Success of Changes
To ensure that you’ve correctly interpreted the collected data and have taken appropriate actions, it is imperative to monitor customer response to the changes you’ve implemented as a result of your feedback program. Conduct new surveys that validate improvement in customer satisfaction and enhanced customer lifetime value.
Turn Up the Dial on Customer Satisfaction
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for developing an effective customer feedback program. What is successful for one company will not be for another. Some organizations can get a fairly reliable view of customer engagement from sales data, trends, and performance metrics. Others will require extensive surveys to get usable data. Most will require a balance of the two. However, keeping a strategic focus that ties data to key decision points along the buying cycle will provide actionable data that can drive effective change, turn up the dial on customer satisfaction, and prolong customer lifetime value.
INI has deployed a significant number of survey applications over the years that have been very successful for our clients. Our INI AudioForms product offers a robust feature set with easy to use web-based administration screens that make creating, deploying, and even analyzing surveys a snap. INI AudioForms is ideal for deploying Net Promoter Surveys, Customer Effort Score Surveys, and CSAT Surveys. Results provide early detection of changes in customer sentiment, expose problem areas, and allow for swift response.Schedule a consultation with one of our customer experience specialists to see just how easy it can be to collect real-time customer feedback with INI AudioForms.
Other Articles in this series:
Part 1: Five Ways to Reduce Customer Effort
Part 2: Three Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction