Putting a priority on searching for change and opportunities that arise from change? Customer insight is a great place to find a happy customer needs, yes? Simple ways to maximize customer insight can be a great way to improve your business.
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
Peter Drucker
Let me share an experience with you.
Recently I had the occasion to visit my local Best Buy. While I was there for one purpose, I decided to have a look at some of the new tablets. A very helpful young man came and provided me with excellent information about the various features and benefits to the different offerings. I wasn’t interested in purchasing that day, so I thanked him and went on my way with my other purchases.
When I went to pay, I asked if I could provide a positive comment about one of the staff who had been so helpful.
The answer was that to provide feedback — either positive of negative — I needed to visit their website. When I explained that I wasn’t interested in filling out a survey — I simply wanted to pass on a compliment to a manager for a job well done by a staff member — I was told they were not set up to receive comments at the store level. Of course, I could have requested that I speak with a manager or a supervisor, but it wasn’t worth my trouble.
It would appear that Best Buy isn’t interested in hearing feedback. That is not a good thing for any business, is it?
We conclude that many businesses either don’t put a priority on collecting inputs from their customers or don’t know how.
In this article, we will offer some effective tips to perform insight collection and simple analysis. Let us get started with tips.
Connect
Connect and always try to move closer to all your customers and especially your best customers. You learn most when you build close relationships with them.
Change your perspective and consider alternative roles. Try and eliminate the single role perspective at all costs and view things from as many angles as possible. You will be amazed at the difference it will make.
Happy customer.
Happy customer … never overlook details
There are no details you should consider as ‘unimportant.’ Until you put all the pieces of the puzzle together, it is difficult to know the importance of each of these customer needs and priorities.
Look for connections
Do you consider connections between seemingly unrelated observations? Try and connect the dots between different facts and observations? It is crucial to continue iterating and building the puzzle of facts and their relationships.
You are never done putting the customer puzzle together, are you? I hope not because the customers are changing quite rapidly.
Maximize customer insight … always dig deeper
Digging deeper is essential for uncovering more details. Can you think of ‘just one more question’? Use all of your curiosity and imagination.
Each new fact that you discover often generates new information needs. All of us need to keep up.
Use your personal experience
Use what you have learned previously, but don’t be biased by it. Don’t let your values and views take charge of getting the true picture.
Always look for evidence to continually validate and refine the insights you have gained.
Now let’s examine an example to amplify these tips:
Just before Thanksgiving, I was at Walmart to make a return. It was a Saturday morning, and the line at the returns counter was long. The more we waited, the more impatient the customers became and increasingly, many took out their displeasure on the returns clerk with opinions on the poor service and lengthy wait.
When I reached the counter, the clerk was scowling and very tense. I smiled and complimented how well she was able to handle so many disgruntled customers. You could see her tension disappear and she also displayed her first smile since I had been there.
In that situation had she been able to listen and mentally record inputs from her customers? Had I offered her an idea on how to speed things up on the returns desk, would she be able to process the information? In this case, I did offer a suggestion, and she did understand and take note of the input.
This story illustrates one of many difficulties in listening to customers and gaining insights. The first part of listening is hearing and, of course, hearing the customer necessitates that they speak. So our first consideration is ‘how do we get our customer to speak with us?’ (Note: hopefully without creating such a negative experience as in this story)
Why is it that customers seem to be reluctant to giving their inputs? I believe there are three main reasons:
First we business people make it difficult and inconvenient (if not impossible) for customers to give us their views.
Second, there is no perception on the customer’s part of an equitable mutual exchange of value … will they ever see a result of their input?
And finally, many of our staff act as if they don’t care. All of us need to weed these guys out quickly.
So to receive more inputs from customers, (1) be more personable to create better relationships, (2) make it convenient, and (3) pay back the value with an active, caring interest in your customer’s advice.
Listen carefully not only to what they say but how they say it because that gives the most important clues as to the effects we are having on our customers. Ask yourselves: Did we intend to create that effect? If not, what effect do we desire? How do we create that effect?
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer service insights from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Several weeks ago, I posted an article on a complaint I experienced first hand with Space Coast Credit Union (SCCU). The complaint in actuality was the result of several problems this bank pushed onto its customers. In total, that led to a very bad customer experience and the poor measuring SCCU customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is important because it provides marketers and business owners with a metric that they can use to manage and improve their businesses.
In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 71 percent responded that they found a customer satisfaction metric very useful in managing and monitoring their businesses.
Here are six reasons why we believe customer satisfaction is so important:
It’s a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty
It’s a point of differentiation
It reduces customer churn
It increases customer lifetime value
It reduces negative word of mouth
It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones
Keep learning– Customer Service Tips … How to Take Charge of Basics
In this article, I will recommend some actions that SCCU should take to make amends for their prior actions, to pay more attention to their customers, and to improve their customer satisfaction.
Does your business focus on customer complaints and the problems behind them? Customer complaints are an incredibly important part of customer insights and therefore the overall service experience you deliver.
Here we will discuss ways to take full advantage of the information in customer complaints. But first, an important question for you.
Have you ever turned a customer complaint into a future opportunity, or better yet, a customer advocate? It can be really rewarding, yes?
Often, a negative experience that a customer has with your business can be salvaged and turned into an opportunity to win them over for life.
But handled poorly, and you could lose customers for life. This is such an important element of customer service that we use it a critical element of our customer service workshops.
We use it to show the power we all have to give our customers a memorable experience.
Here are some simple recommendations I suggest SCCU employ for ways to gather more feedback and customer complaints like mine.
Give customers your complete attention. Don’t multi-task. Don’t half- listen.
Write down what they are telling you and get specifics from them. Then confirm that you understand.
Focus only on them. These actions go for all customer-facing employees.
They also need a process for collecting all customer insight inputs, establishing action priorities, and finally taking action.
Never overlook details
Don’t overlook details … as ‘unimportant.’ Until you put all the pieces of the puzzle together, it is difficult to know the importance of details.
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … connect
Connect and then move closer. You learn most when you build close relationships with your customers.
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … dig deeper
Keep pressing for ‘just one more question.’ Each new fact that you discover often generates new information needs.
Use your personal experience
Put your personal experience to work, but don’t be biased by it. Don’t let your values and views take charge of getting the true picture.
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … look for connections
Spot connections between seemingly unrelated observations. Keep iterating and building the puzzle of facts and their relationships.
Deal directly and don’t hand customers off
Please hold while we transfer you. Your call is very important to us.
Don’t you hate this response? While you’ll experience less of this problem when handling support via email, it’s still important to get people to the right employee quickly.
Never miss an opportunity to briefly explain to a customer why this transfer will be to their benefit. It’s hard to get any customer happy or excited about being transferred, but consider the two choices you have:
You are getting transferred. “Well, this stinks!”
You will be transferred to our ____ specialist who can better answer your question. “Well … okay, then!”
Without this relevant insertion, customers won’t know that you are trying to do the right thing.
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … don’t be too formal
Research suggests that personalization is powerful when interacting with anyone, but especially with your customers.
Remember to speak as if you were talking with an acquaintance. A little familiarity can go a long way toward getting customers on your side.
Apologize and mean it
This is often hard, especially if you did not cause the problem.
When you apologize in this situation, you are not necessarily taking the blame for causing the problem.
You are apologizing for the customer having a bad experience. Put yourself in their shoes. Be sincere.
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … assure them you’ll fix the problem
Because you listened and you confirmed their complaint, you know why they are upset.
Take the next step and assure them you will take action to make sure it does not happen again. Otherwise, why would they come back? (You need to fix the problem too.)
Measuring SCCU customer satisfaction … thankthem
Without direct customer feedback, we have no idea if we are delivering the experience our customers want.
When they tell us we have failed, they are offering priceless information on how we can improve our business. They are telling us what we need to do to keep customers coming back.
So thank them for their help. It’s a rare customer who will take the time and effort to offer feedback. Thanking them will go a long way toward winning them back.
Focus on customer convenience … how could we make things easier for you?
Remove the constraints your customers have. Consider ways they can help you help them.
We often assume certain things can’t change; then we sit frozen like deer in the headlights overcome with frustration.
If we lift those restrictions on our thinking, we can better visualize how things could be, which is liberating and empowering.
The bottom line
Lee Resource Inc. found that for every customer complaint 26 other unhappy customers have remained silent.
That is an amazing statistic for us. Most companies think they are the best and they have no unhappy customers. The reality is, 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain.
In fact, we have found that most simply just leave and never come back.
What are you doing to measure customer satisfaction and identify unhappy customers?
Customer satisfaction plays an important role in your business. Not only is it the leading indicator to measure customer loyalty, identify unhappy customers.
Set a goal to reduce churn and increase revenue. It is also a key point of differentiation that helps you to attract new customers in competitive business environments.
I hope this blog post has shed light on why customer satisfaction is so important to the success of your business.
Remember, customers, don’t care what you do. They only care what they’re left with after you have done it.
Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.
Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your customer service improvement and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
