Everyone wants more business, and getting more clients out of your existing network will ultimately come down to your customer’s satisfaction with your company or product. While it’s fun to develop a business development strategy, to sustain healthy growth, it is imperative that you don’t neglect your existing customer experience while doing so.
So what can you do to help your business improve your customer satisfaction? Let’s take a look at three processes that you can quickly put into place to stay in touch with your existing clients and make sure that you are providing the best experience possible.
Find Out What You Are Doing Well and What Needs Improvement
Believe it or not, many businesses can go years and lose tons of business without fully understanding why customers may be leaving. Their products or services may not be meeting expectations, or they may be offering sub-standard customer service without even realizing that there is a problem. While finding and rooting out these problems may seem like an insurmountable task, you can quickly and affordably discover some of your major problems by putting together a survey.
Services like SurveyMonkey are a perfect fit for the majority of businesses that are looking to get feedback from their existing customer base. They can put together a wide variety of questions, ranging from multiple choice to fill-in-the-blank, to a sliding rating scale (rank this from 1-10) to gain clarity into their performance.
These surveys can be emailed, posted on social media, or even sent directly to individuals through the use of a unique URL The survey service will then harvest the data for you and report back in an easy-to-understand format that will help you ascertain exactly how you are doing in a variety of different areas.
You will also score points even if surveys aren’t filled out, as your clients will realize that you care about your business and value their feedback.
Go Above and Beyond to Show Your Customers that they aren’t just a Number
In today’s fast pace world, it is very easy to get a new client and immediately turn your focus towards getting the next one in the pipeline. As a result, anything you can do to build a relationship with your customer will go a long way towards gaining loyalty and establishing the rapport that will lead to a long-term relationship.
It is always a good idea to have an onboarding worksheet, or similar process that will help you learn more about your customers. With this data, you can do things like:
• Send out birthday cards and emails
• Thank customers for their business and new purchases
• Reward clients for new referrals
• Learn about their interests, and how you can establish rapport
• Find out where you can connect with them on social media
By going the extra mile and developing a relationship with your customers, they will feel less like a revenue producing “number” for your business and more like a valued part of your business.
Track and Monitor Your Social & Review Websites
20 Years ago, unless you proactively sought out feedback it could be tough to identify customers who were happy or unhappy with your service. With the emergence of social media and review websites, this has become a much easier process. You can easily find out the overall sentiment for your business by paying attention to these online properties and addressing any problems that are identified.
If you happen to see any negative reviews or mention of your brand on a review website, or social media, it is an excellent opportunity to not only address the customer’s concern directly, but will also give you a heads up that particular area of your business may need some attention. More often than not, the customer will be pleased that you are going above and beyond to address their concerns, and will become an advocate for your business moving forward.
Keep in mind too, if their complaints and reviews go unanswered, then prospective clients will probably run across their comments when researching your business, and could become quite damaging to your new customer acquisition efforts.
By taking the time to focus on service and your customer satisfaction, you will likely build more rapport with your clients. You will also be able to gain valuable insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and be able to implement the proper measures to improve your business. Ultimately, these activities will result in increased client retention and a greater willingness to send more prospects your way in the form of referrals.
