The service, that your customers experience is a key component in your ability to secure customer loyalty.For every company that declares as its goal to be more customer-driven it is from the start crucial to understand the company’s position in relation to the customers: How do the customers perceive the company’s products and services? Are they satisfied with the products and services that they buy? Do they think that there is an acceptable relation between price and quality? Which factors influence the customers’ satisfaction and loyalty? Is customer satisfaction rising or falling, and what is the customers’ evaluation of the company in comparison with its competitors?
Companies that maintain an insight into the customers’ notion of satisfaction, quality, loyalty, or other strategic success factors can better respond to developments while continuously working at improving competitiveness at the parameters most important to the customers.
Mass communication creates short-lived expectations and interest among consumers - but it is the service that customers and potential customers actually experience when they are finally in touch with the company that creates lasting impressions and secures their loyalty.
An extensive American study shows that 70 percent of the customer’s purchase decision is based on how they feel they are treated by the company. Thus, in spite of Multi-Channel contact possibilities for customers, such as self-service systems and homepages, analyses show that it is very difficult to create loyalty via these channels alone.
People deal with people
It is through personal contact, via meetings or the telephone, that the basis for loyalty is created. This is why more and more companies today base their customer contact on telephone service. Unfortunately, most often the company has no idea how the customers actually experience this contact; Does it ensure customer loyalty? Or does the contact actually create dissatisfaction resulting in a negative influence on the annual accounts’ bottom line?
Therefore, it is imperative to make certain that when a customer contacts the company an exceptional customer experience is delivered.
It is our experience that the most effective method to secure a good customer experience is to professionally work with the employees who are facing the customers on the basis of factually founded analysis identifying behaviors, that should be adjusted.
By questioning the customers about their experience on different parameters it is possible to ensure the best service daily corresponding to the strategic goals the company wishes to reach. This applies within areas other than customer satisfaction as well, e.g. increased sales or customer retention.
A firmly rooted and continuous dialogue will create the possibility of measuring the customers’ satisfaction on individual, comparable and defined parts of the company.
It will be possible, for example, for the company to identify how the different sales teams within the same organization perform in comparison to one another. Thus the company benchmarks the different organizational units in relationship to one another or in relation to the customers’ qualitative satisfaction - and not only in relation to the purely quantitative goals such as number of answered calls, number of sales, etc.
Information only has value when it is used
The use of the customers’ feedback and the company’s involvement of employees in the use of this data, while creating visibility and the understanding of the necessity of altering behaviour in certain areas, serve as the basis for ensuring a good customer experience.
The company can then systematically work on improving the customer service starting from the customers’ actual experiences; the individual employee’s behaviour has become the key to success - this applies to both management and the individual employee.
This is what TeleFaction calls Return on Behavior.
