Listening Improves Customer Experience
Explore the various avenues in which you can communicate and listen to your customers to enhance their experience.
Listening is key to both personal and business relationships. It goes hand in hand with any successful exchange of information whether that be a conversation, email, support ticket, survey, etc. Failure to do so has a significant impact on the success of your business.
“We have a mantra. Listen to your customers; otherwise, you will have none,” says Zach Hendrix, Co-Founder of GreenPal.
So why does Zach and so many other executives firmly believe in the power of listening? Let’s explore some of the top 6 reasons:
1. Customer Feedback: What is better than real time customer feedback? That’s correct, nothing! Its customary to leverage your customer facing teams to capture feedback but getting that information from the source is gold. When you have customers that are willing to provide real time feedback, you now have the ability to address unsatisfied customers and turn their experience around before they leave. You have the key to change a onetime customer to returning customer.
2. Data/ Metrics relative to service performance, product satisfaction, and overall experience. When leveraging an emoji app survey, you can use the one click responses to get real data and statistics about your business to identify opportunities for improvement. Leverage the initial metrics as a benchmark to monitor and track data as you
3. Customer stories and testimonials are incredibly valuable! By capturing feedback, you capture testimonials and their story that can be shared broadly. They are literally gold when it comes to marketing and branding collateral. Potential customers trust referrals based on positive experiences especially when the company doesn’t have established brad recognition.
4. Drives Customer Retention: Having the knowledge to understand how a business can change a customer’s experience from negative to positive is so powerful. It takes 2 main things; 1. Method to obtain that feedback and 2. The will to learn and act on that feedback to make continuous improvements to customer experience.
5. Increases repeat customers for higher spend: If customers know that their feedback was heard, acted on and see the improvements then not only will they be loyal customers, but they will likely become higher spend customers.
6. Employee Morale is one of the least expected outcomes of customer feedback initiatives, and is the most surprising benefit. More often than not, the feedback that businesses receive is generally positive. Customers love to share when they had great service and often say “Thank you, John!” to the person who assisted them. Management teams should leverage these comments to share internally not only with the employee but the team/ company as well! It creates friendly competition with teammates. Its motivating to the individual to receive positive reinforcement of their work and also have that publicly acknowledged.
Why is it important to listen to your customers?
Hearing (and listening) to your customers is imperative as it helps understand their needs and preferences, builds trust and strengthen the customer relationship, stay competitive and practice good business. It can also help you identify problems and make improvements, stay ahead of future trends, and build a long lasting positive reputation for your business.
It’s obvious that listening to your customers is more important now than ever seen before. Today’s competitive and fast paced environment, your customers have endless options and they will leave you for others within skipping a beat.
But you can get ahead of this by making a concerted effort to listen to and act on customer feedback. This will demonstrate to your customers that you care about their needs and are willing to go the extra mile.
This will help build customer loyalty, drive repeat business, and ultimately, help your business succeed. So never underestimate the power of customer feedback – it just might be the key to your business’s future success.
Embrace the opportunity to listen and communicate as part of your company values and culture. It will build stronger relationships with your customers and your employees for a lot of win-win situations.