Customer Experience: What Do your Customers Say Behind your Back?

Growing seeds showing how customer experience should be

Great Customer Experience Drives Growth in B2B Organizations from Money Pit to Money Profit

Negative reviews and complaints when it comes to customer experience can feel very SCARY. You have a support system, but that doesn’t let you know what your customers say behind your back.

Have you heard from any of your customers complaining about their experience with your company?

Are they happy, unhappy with what they purchased? Are they even planning to exchange you with a competitor and terminate their contract? Unfortunately, customers DO seem to switch brands when they feel they aren’t getting the level of service they desire.

Well, if just one unhappy customer criticize you or talk negatively about you it feels like a death sentence. It may take seconds to spread it allover but it takes ages to rebuild your reputation.

What does Research say about Customer Experience and Loyalty?

Based on an over two years  research conducted by Avanade on customers’ experience and loyalty from December 2014 to November 2016. It was gathered from over 13.5k companies representing 22 industry areas and based on 24 billion website visits, 235.7 million chats and 11.1 million tickets. The results showed the following:

  • Cost is not the top issue for customers.
  • They prioritize the customer experience over the price of a product or service when weighing a purchase decision.
  • Almost 80% of B2B marketers rate themselves as “ok” at delivering a good customer experience while only 12% claim to be “very effective” at delivering a great customer experience.
  • Overall, only 14% of customer experience decision makers feel they are keeping a step ahead of changing customer expectations.

Here is the thing:

 

What are your greatest barriers to success? 49% say Inefficient Internal Processes and 42% Tracking and reporting the right metrics
Excerpt from the report on Customer Experience from 2016

Your mission in succeeding with getting positive customer experience is:

  1. Know and to tell a loyal from an unhappy or even happy customers.
  2. Measure how prone your customers are to recommend you, track it and report it.
  3. NOT to just assume that most of your customers are satisfied.
  4. Not postpone taking the right measures to know where you are and how customers look at you. You need to stop procrastinating and get on with it. You don’t want to be chocked by unpleasant truths which could be in contrast with your perception and expectations.

Having  a loyal customer is a powerful asset and you want to have as many of these as possible. But converting them to this status demands efforts, knowing your metrics and engagement.

And here comes the question:

How can I tell about my Customers Loyalty and where is it going to lead me?

Now, it’s the time to run your Net Promoter score (NPS) and ask the Ultimate Question “Would you recommend us to a friend or a colleague?”

Infographic about Net Promoter Score a metric for Customer Experience

Now, keep YOUR EYES on the Prize

NPS is not only an anchor to know your customers experience, NPS helps you consider current attitudes, and most importantly PREDICT customers’ behavior and attitudes.

The research results from the Report on the Marketing Driven Customer Experience also revealed how focus on customer experience can pay off: Of the companies that invested in customer experience and loyalty within the last 12 months saw:

  1. More than 58% increased customer satisfaction,
  2. 45 % higher customer loyalty through reduced churn, and
  3. A similar proportion enjoyed increased customer acquisition through word-of-mouth.

You get Financial Benefits, too:

  1. Revenue and profitability were boosted by customer experience investment.
  2. A healthy return on investment, with the research finding that the average return for every $1 spent on customer experience was $3, a figure that rose to $5 in the financial services sector.
  3. Focus on content marketing because it is considered the top lead generation and revenue ROI by marketers and ranked as the top marketing priorities.

Customers Negative experiences are a good mechanism for identifying what needs to be improved. But putting resources into it will help you adjust to the ever changing demands of customers and beat your competitors. Don’t just treat it as ticking a box but delight YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS AND TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

It’s true how Charles Dickens, from “Great Expectations” put it :

“…The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

Want to learn more about the type of your customers, check our previous blog on NPS. With the right metrics, measurement, follow ups, plans, engagement and a well established service minded policy, you can easily turn bad reviews, negative bad mouthing into opportunities to keep your customers and turn them to lifelong ones.

Don’t hesitate to share your experience with us! Leave you feedback.

(In Swedish: Vill du läsa mer om hur du kommer igång med NPS på svenska, så kan du ladda ned den här PDF:en
https://www.sonician.info/p/get-started-with-nps-pdf)

 

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